Israel's policies are feeding the cancer of anti-semitism

[Scurrilous]

It is a lie that to reject Zionism as it is practised today is to be the inheritor of Hitler's racism

<snip>

"The chief rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, is right. His reaction to the Anglican synod's call for sanctions against Israel is understandable. Hatred of Judaism - now commonly called anti-semitism - is a virus that has infected Christendom for two millennia. It continues to stalk the world despite its most virulent outbreak in Nazi Germany. It should not be left untreated. For too many it remains the unlearned lesson of the Holocaust. It should haunt decent Christians for generations to come.

The German pope knows that particularly well and is on the battle lines against it. On this issue, nothing divides him from the Archbishop of Canterbury and most other church leaders. If, as some now think, today's Jews are the Muslims - hatred transferred - that simply means there is a battle to maintain our common humanity on more than one front. All collective hatreds poison the body politic.

I say this as the child of a German Jewish-born father who escaped in time. His mother did not. I say it as a half-Jewish German child chased around a British playground in the second world war and taunted with "he's not just a German, he's a Jew". A double insult. But I say this too as a Christian priest who shares the historic guilt of all the churches. All Christians share a bloody inheritance.

If I feel all that in my guts and know it in my head, I cannot stand by and watch the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - one of the world's most dangerous outbreaks of collective hatred - as a dispassionate onlooker. I cannot listen calmly when an Iranian president talks of wiping out Israel. Jewish fears go deep. They are not irrational. But I cannot listen calmly either when a great many citizens of Israel think and speak of Palestinians in the way a great many Germans thought and spoke about Jews when I was one of them and had to flee.

If the Christian in me has good reason to be ashamed, so now does the Jew in me. I passionately believe that Israel has the right, and its people have the right, to live in peace and in secure borders. But I know too that modern Israel was born in terror and made possible in its present Zionist form by killing and a measure of ethnic cleansing. That is history. Tell me of a nation with an innocent history. But the Zionism at the heart of Israeli politics is about the present and the future. It makes me fear for the soul of Israel today and the survival of its children tomorrow."

more

[Behind the Aegis]

1. What a load of hand-wringing crap!

Sounds like the words of an apologist. The "prophet" Uri Avnery?! :puke: and :rofl: at the same time! Nothing more than excusing those who use violence against all Jews as an expression of dislike for Israel. Sounds like 'conflating' to me. He needs a good therapist!

[Violet_Crumble]

2. It was a really heartfelt piece of writing...

This man loves Israel and speaks from his heart. How do these comments make him an apologist??

If the Christian in me has good reason to be ashamed, so now does the Jew in me. I passionately believe that Israel has the right, and its people have the right, to live in peace and in secure borders. But I know too that modern Israel was born in terror and made possible in its present Zionist form by killing and a measure of ethnic cleansing. That is history. Tell me of a nation with an innocent history. But the Zionism at the heart of Israeli politics is about the present and the future. It makes me fear for the soul of Israel today and the survival of its children tomorrow.

I say all this despairing of the Israel I love. Its people are my people. The Palestinians are my neighbours. I wish they had stronger and better leaders. I wish their despairing young people had not been driven to violence. Just as I understand Jewish fears, I understand their despair.

and the ones I suspect will most upset some folk:

But the main objective of my writing today, is to nail the lie that to reject Zionism as it practised today is in effect to be anti-semitic, to be an inheritor of Hitler's racism. That argument, with the Holocaust in the background, is nothing other than moral blackmail. It is highly effective. It condemns many to silence who fear to be thought anti-semitic. They are often the very opposite. They are often people whose heart bleeds at Israel's betrayal of its true heritage.

In Britain, Jews for Justice for Palestinians organises to give Jewishness a human face. Tell them they are anti-semites and they will laugh bitterly, for the charge hurts deeply and is a lie.

Violet...

[Behind the Aegis]

3. It was crap!

The title was nothing more than apologetic posturing about anti-Semitism. However, since he is "part Jewish," I am sure he will be quoted often. :eyes: I would say it was 'self-loathing,' but he isn't even a Jew. This shit about "oh, I understand Jewish issues and their pain," is as idiotic as those Americans that claim they are 'descendants of American Indian princesses.'

No Jew can ever be an anti-Semite. BULLSHIT! Two words...ROY COHN!

If you have Jewish roots and hate Jews, you are an anti-Semite! If you can "excuse or understand" anti-Semitism because of Israeli policy, you are an anti-Semite!

The article was hand-wringing crap! The very fact that he 'idolizes' that self-loathing POS Avnery pretty much sums it up. I am surprised he didn't give a "shout-out" to the sell-out, Amira Hass!

The fact that he has the audacity to speak about "moral blackmail" in regards to the Holocaust makes my ILL! He is nothing more than a "useful fool/tool."

The greatest threat to Jews are not the neo-Nazis, not the anti-Semites of the right and left, not the Klan, not the Holocaust revisionsits...our greatest threat are those who are Jews that are willing to be a part of the bullshit that excuses hate against Jews because of Israeli policies, or their interpretation of Zionism! They are nothing more than sell-outs! Perhaps they will be able to get jobs at the next camps set up to "contain" us...but after the rest of us are gone, if they think they won't share our fate, then they really are fucking stupid!

[Violet_Crumble]

6. Opposing Israeli policy does not make someone an anti-Semite...

...or an apologist. If you read the article again, you'll see clearly that he didn't excuse or understand anti-Semitism because of Israeli policy. He said the ongoing occupation feedsanti-Semitism, which it does...

While you find his words 'crap', he comes across as caring much more deeply about both Jews and Palestinians than those Americans who label most if not all criticism of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians as being anti-Semitic, self-loathing or sell-outs...

Sorry, bta, but the Holocaust IS used as a form of moral blackmail when it comes to the conflict. It's manifested itself here in this forum from time to time, and it's used as an attempt to justify anything and everything that Israel does when it comes to the Palestinians. It's wrong when it happens, just like it's wrong when the Holocaust is used as a tool to criticise Israel and to make comparisons between the Holocaust and Israel's treatment of the Palestinians...

Also, I wasn't aware that you decide who is and isn't a Jew based on whether their views on the conflict are the same as yrs. Who is and isn't Jewish (in some quarters, conversion to Judaism is not recognised as making someone Jewish) is something the various Jewish movements like Reform and Conservative don't agree on:

'First, traditional Judaism maintains that a person is a Jew if his mother is a Jew, regardless of who his father is. The liberal movements, on the other hand, consider a person to be Jewish if either of his parents was Jewish and the child was raised Jewish. Thus, if the child of a Jewish father and a Christian mother is raised Jewish, the child is a Jew according to the Reform movement, but not according to the Orthodox movement. On the other hand, if the child of a Christian father and a Jewish mother is not raised Jewish, the child is a Jew according to the Orthodox movement, but not according to the Reform movement! The matter becomes even more complicated, because the status of that children's children also comes into question.'

http://www.jewfaq.org/whoisjew.htm

And as a very wise Reform Rabbi once told me, in his opinion being Jewish has more to do with what someone feels inside and how strongly they identify with the Jewish people. Strangely enough, he didn't say anything about stances regarding the I/P conflict being the deciding factor in who is Jewish and who isn't...



Violet...

[Name removed]

8. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Violet_Crumble]

9. But you called Haas and Avnery self-loathing etc...

The impression you got from reading the article was: 'If you can "excuse or understand" anti-Semitism because of Israeli policy, you are an anti-Semite!' But as I pointed out, he was not excusing or understanding anti-Semitism - he was saying that the I/P conflict feeds anti-Semitism, which it obviously does...

Conflating Jews with Israel? I've lost count of the number of posts from 'pro-Israeli' posters that do exactly that....

Just because you disagree with his stance on the conflict does NOT mean that his words are 'false caring'. And who are those Australians, British and Canadians who supposedly fail to see anti-Semitism, bta? I'll repeat it again for you. Opposition to Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is NOT anti-Semitism, and while yr not coming straight out and saying it, that's definately the implication yr making...

You claim that the Holocaust is used as moral blackmail when it's mentioned by people you disagree with (and yr claim that he excused anti-Semitism is incorrect, as I pointed out in my first paragraph), but that the Holocaust isn't used as moral blackmail by 'supporters' of Israel seems to be nothing more than claiming it doesn't happen if it's done by anyone whose views on the conflict you agree with. The reality is that it's used on both sides, and it does no-one any favours to try to pretend that it's only done by one side...

bta, please read the link I supplied for you about Judaism. I didn't post anything about who was a Jew according to Nazis, but who is a Jew according to Jewish religious movements such as Reform Judaism. Also, someone who is born and raised Jewish is still a Jew even if they're an atheist, and if this guy was raised Jewish it seems to me he could have more right to think of himself as Jewish than someone who was converted to Judaism....

Violet...

[Name removed]

10. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[eyl]

35. I know some Orthodox communities

"unofficially" treat converts as "second-class Jews", but I can't think of any Jewish denomination or sect that doesn't accept converts at all.

[Colorado Blue]

It's also real convenient of people who deplore the Nakba,

to ignore the factors leading up to it: Arab violence against Middle Eastern Jews (and Opposition and Christian Arabs) that had been going on for nearly 30 years before the war of 1984, and the threats to exterminate them all, led to this. The Arabs started the war, and their intentions were, as they are today, quite plain. So many innocent people got caught in the middle, people who didn't want a fight.

Why is this so frequently overlooked? It's sweeping major facts of history right under the rug.

Another point: the persecutions and expulsions of 900,000 Middle Eastern Jews, on top of the granting of 78% of the Palestine Mandate to Jordan and the obvious fact that Jewish people aren't safe anywhere in the Middle East outside of Israel, makes it impossible for Israel not to remain a garrison state. Where else can her citizens go? Even the relatively enlightened King Abdullah cast forth the Jews of East Jerusalem and the West Bank after 1948 - ancient communities dating back thousands of years rendered judenrein.

The "ethnic cleansing" has worked both ways. It's nauseating that only one side of this coin is ever mentioned, and NO responsibility for the Palestinian situation EVER devolves to the Arabs, certainly not in THIS piece of tripe.

That in and of itself is indicative of extreme bias.

[Violet_Crumble]

32. That post was a subjective and selective use of facts...

That applies to the bits that are factually correct. The rest is not true at all, for example the claim that Jewish people aren't safe anywhere in the Middle East outside of Israel - has anyone told all those Israeli tourists who visit Egypt on a regular basis that Egypt isn't Israel? ;)

It's no good to accuse a piece of writing of extreme bias and in doing so display extreme bias. Overlooking everything but the role of the Arab states and their populations (except for Christian Arabs, of course) isn't an effective way of persuading anyone that all the major facts are being produced..

Also, I have to correct you in yr claim that the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries is never mentioned. It rates mentions in many of the books I've read about that era.

There's a big difference between justifying what was done to the Palestinians in 1948 and being aware of the factors in play at the time. Likewise, there's a big difference between blaming the Arabs for all the evils of the world when it comes to what happened, and acknowledging that the Arab states as well as Israel as well as a few other parties hold responsibility for what happened to the Palestinians...

Violet...

[Poll_Blind]

4. You are so quick to call another Jew a self-loather. Fascinating.

"Sounds like the words of an apologist." - "Nothing more than excusing those who use violence against all Jews as an expression of dislike for Israel."

You're a one-person slur factory.

PB

[Behind the Aegis]

5. And you are so quick to miss the point.

He is not a Jew. Or didn't you read the article?

But, your response was anticipated and not in the least bit surprising.

[Violet_Crumble]

7. I know. Some feminists do this too...

The especially hardline ones who are so quick with the refrain: 'why do you hate women when yr one yrself???' because they disagree with the hardline view that no man is capable of being a feminist. One of the reasons I don't enter into online debates about feminism, as the sight of feminists having all sorts of slurs thrown at them is a really ugly sight, imo....

Violet...

[Colorado Blue]

17. He isn't a Jew. Also, speaking of slur factories - is the pot

calling the kettle black?

[pelsar]

11. i didnt think much of the article..one way or another..until...

Tragically, Israel's policies feed it - and when world Jewry defends Israeli policies right or wrong, then anger turns not only against Israel, but against all Jews. I wish it were mere rhetoric to say that Israeli politics today make a holocaust the day after tomorrow credible. If the whole Muslim world hates Israel, that is no idle speculation.

so israeli politics has made the muslim world hate israel so much that they want to destroy it....i'm confused which policies...the ones in 48 when the state came into existance...since they certainly tried

perhaps in 67, when they became established as modern state, busy helping the immigrants get established...was it that policy that cause such hatred?

surly it cant just be the occupied territories.....does the muslim world hate all occupiers or just the jewish ones in palestine?...i do believe other "occupiers" are a bit more ruthless
________________

blaming israeli for muslim world hatred so much that they want to destroy israel...doesnt really cut it with me.

[Stockholm]

12. Why not

Blowback is blowback?

[pelsar]

13. lacks responsability....

if the "blowback" is jews returning to israel and the "muslims" in egypt, jordan, saudi arabia have a hard time tolerating that...well, i dont have much sympathy for their tolerence level. (48 war).

If the "muslims" are having a hard time tolerating israel the country in 67..i would then understand the "blowback" to mean that the jews created a succussful country while the "muslim" states langished.....is that the blowback?...or was it loosing when they attempted to anihilate the state of israel?

it couldnt be just the occuapation since that only started after 67...and the attempts to remove israel already had two previous failed attempts...

so the blowback obviously is simply israels existance...thats what the articles about

[Stockholm]

23. Sigh - you are right

But the article is also about the authors' "fear for the soul of Israel today and the survival of its children tomorrow".

Blowback is what blowback does, a never ending circle of violence.

Painting PI in black and white is futile.

[Jim Sagle]

14. Self-hating, antisemitic hogwash!

[Coastie for Truth]

15. I have a different view

I think it is Arab total intransigence fueled by the encouragement of the Post WW 1 map drawers and former colonial masters (see, e.g., ) who destroyed viable Islamic societies for short term, colonialist, imperialistic goals, and the refusal of the colonialist, imperialist map drawers to come to grips with their colonialsim and imperialism.

I have no feelings against Paul Oestreicher - my grand kids are half Irish Roman Catholic, in my humanitarian work I wear the (colors reversed) Cross of the Swiss Confederation, and I am a lay member of the Order of Saint Florian (and go their annual Mass).

[Colorado Blue]

20. Colonialist, imperialist map drawers - and their appointment

of a criminal to be "The Mufti of Jerusalem" over the the objections of other local Arabs - putting the Husseini family in charge of the situation was promoting the fox to Chief of the Henhouse.

It's amazing, that said imperialists can't to this day, confront their own responsibility in this matter.

Better to just blame the usual suspect.

[Englander]

16. Leading Anglican hits back in 'anti-Israel' row

Stephen Bates, religious affairs correspondent
Monday February 20, 2006
The Guardian

Anglican churchmen hit back yesterday in the increasingly ugly spat between the Church of England and the chief rabbi over the general synod's call for disinvestment in a company making bulldozers used to demolish Palestinian homes. They denied that their criticism of Israeli government policy was tantamount to anti-semitism.

In today's Guardian Canon Paul Oestreicher, a leading member of the church's peace and reconciliation movement, who lost his Jewish grandmother in the Holocaust and was a refugee from Nazi Germany, says Jewish groups are engaging in moral blackmail in raising the issue of anti-semitism against critics of the Israeli government. He says: "The main objective of my writing today is to nail the lie that to reject Zionism as it is practised today is in effect to be anti-semitic, to be an inheritor of Hitler's racism. That argument, with the Holocaust in the background, is nothing other than moral blackmail.

"It is highly effective. It condemns many to silence who fear to be thought anti-semitic. They are often the very opposite. They are often people whose heart bleeds at Israel's betrayal of its true heritage. When world Jewry defends Israeli policies right or wrong, then anger turns not only against Israel but against all Jews. I wish it was mere rhetoric to say that Israeli politics today make a holocaust the day after tomorrow credible."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1713408,00.html

[Colorado Blue]

18. This is just a stupid article. Forget the polemics. He's

actually proposing that antisemitism is the fault of Israel.

Israel was born as an attempt to escape antisemitism.

This backward, circular reasoning is so dumb. It illuminates NOTHING.

It's time people came to grips with the original problem, which has sickened our culture for almost 2,000 years, beginning with the initial blood libel: The Jews Killed Christ.

It's been downhill from there. In the East, we are apostate, killed and dispossessed and driven out of Arabia for refusing to convert to Islam.

We're fortunate that any of us have managed to survive at all, let alone with our culture not only intact, but flourishing, although our numbers are tragically small and constantly threatened.

Get real, people. Stop trying to wriggle out from under the truth.

[Coastie for Truth]

19. Succinctly, that is the one issue

It's time people came to grips with the original problem, which has sickened our culture for almost 2,000 years, beginning with the initial blood libel: The Jews Killed Christ.

Everything else is self serving psycho gibberish.

[Wordie]

24. Tell me, Coastie,

do you really believe that criticism of Israel is motiviated only by anti-Semitism and/or that all those who engage in any criticism are therefore anti-Semitic? Please, just answer yes or no.

[Coastie for Truth]

25. Rephrase your question.

[Wordie]

26. I doubt rephrasing it could make it much clearer.

Although, I must admit there were really two questions there. Have you no reply to either?

[Coastie for Truth]

27. Too many ABSOLUTES

Your asked:

do you REALLY believe that ALL (implied by the grammatical structure and syntax) criticism of Israel is motiviated ONLY by anti-Semitism and/or that ALL those who engage in ANY criticism are THEREFORE anti-Semitic? Please, just answer yes or no.

?? :shrug: ??

And let me ask you - do you sincerely believe that NONE of the criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, that NONE of the conflation of, say, Labor Zionists, with PNAC is anti-Semitic?

[Wordie]

28. Ok...that's fair.

Many others do state the claim that all those who criticize Israel are anti-Semitic in just such absolutist terms. I can understand your objection to the question, though. Let me ask this instead: do you think that it does not always indicate anti-Semitism to criticize Israel? That should be a little easier to answer.

And, I'll even answer your questions, as an indication of my good faith in asking the question I asked of you. I do think that some criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. I also think that some of the PNAC stuff is anti-Semitic. The thing is though, I don't think that because some of these things are anti-Semitic, that the assumption should automatically be made that all, or even the substantial portion of either of these are anti-Semitic.

[Coastie for Truth]

29. More balanced question

You asked "do you think that it does not always indicate anti-Semitism to criticize Israel."

In my opinion it does not always indicate anti-Semitism to criticize Israel.

Nor do I think it is anti-American to criticize the Bush regime - or anti-Brit to criticize Sir Robert Sykes or The Guardian or even some actions of the Church of England.

In fact, I will pitch back a curve ball. I think some criticism of Israel can be interpreted as anti-Arab. I also think some criticism of Israel can be interpreted as anti-Brit.

Let me through in a major caveat - I came of age politically (first run for office) in the late 1960's-early 1970's, and such phrases as "neighborhood schools" or "magnet schools" branded one a racist.

[pelsar]

30. a clarification....

I think its gets "muddy" between anti-Semitism and just regular criticism is when a different standard is used. One for the world and one for israel. At the same time i would suggest calling it anti-Semitism is too simplistic, as its also "anti colonialism' for those who perceive israel as the last remaining "western colonial outpost (even though a quick look at other western countries-France, finds this not to be true). or for those who perceive israel as the cause for all the anguish in the world today (if only israel didn't exist....ask denmark how that works) as well as "liberal guilt"....."placing" a western country right in the "middle of arab/lslam and those 'natives...deciding that jewish historical and cultural ties are not as important as non interfering with the "native culture"...

or israels occupation war....where as it is a war, and whereas it is an occupation, to ignore the limitations of military and political forces, to ignore the complexity of it, the history or even the present actions and pretend that the 67 borders solves all the problems hints of such simplicity that it borders on anti-Semitism. More so criticism of the IDF, not calling it by its proper name, is also part of the delegitimization process (ever hear the British army being called BOF)...but most of all, ignoring the relativeness of the situation, i.e. the double standard is most blatant of all-pretending that the limitations that exist in the world, the human mistakes that occur simply don't apply to either israel or the IDF....

ever try to have a comparison between the IDF and the US army? British.....an attempt to define whether the IDF is really bad, incompetent or above the others....ever try to compare number of journalist hurt/killed in this conflict vs their numbers here and compare to other conflicts in an attempt to decide is israel really is targeting them?....

cant do it here (DU).....the discussion is either locked or the remarks are: trying to change the subject.....which is very strange, since nothing exists in a vacuum...thats why so many criticism borders on anti-semestism/israel...the double standard. Its the double standard that is so hard for many of us jews/israelis to understand....if its not a form of anti semetism that what is it?.....

criticizes israel all you like, as far as i am concerned..but also compare it to the rest of the world and other armies, democracies, and dictatorships, histories...only then can it be seen to be "good, bad, evil etc. Start a tread as such. i'll be happy to fill in the blanks.

us humans, including jews, have limitiations.

[Coastie for Truth]

31. A recommendation ---Please read (even if you don't believe a word)

1.

2.

3.

4.

<<<snip>>>
When Harry Truman, Roosevelt's successor, learned that Jewish displaced persons were living in camps whose conditions paralleled that of Nazi work camps, he pressed Great Britain to open the doors of Palestine to 100,000 European Jewish refugees. Stalling for time, Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin suggested that he and Truman convene the joint Committee to meet with the refugees in Europe, as well as leaders in the Arab world and Palestine, before deciding whether mass Jewish immigration to Palestine was feasible. Truman assented, and Gruber, armed with her passport and camera, accompanied the committee members to the squalid DP camps in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

<<<SNIP>>>

The committee members spent four months in Europe, Palestine and the Arab countries and another month in Switzerland digesting their experiences. At the end of its deliberations, the committee's 12 members - six Britons and six Americans - unanimously agreed that Britain should allow 100,000 Jewish immigrants to settle in Palestine. Britain's foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, however, rejected the finding.



Eventually the issue was taken up by the United Nations, which appointed a Special Committee on Palestine. Like Its predecessor, UNSCOP visited the camps in Germany, then traveled to the Arab states and Palestine. Gruber accompanied UNSCOP as a correspondent for the New York Herald. While in Jerusalem, she learned that a former American pleasure boat, renamed the Exodus, had been attempting to deliver 4,500 Jewish refugees - including 600 children, mostly orphans - when it was attacked by five British destroyers and a cruiser. Gruber left immediately for Haifa and witnessed the Exodus entering the harbor, looking, as Gruber wrote, "like a matchbox splintered by a nutcracker."

During the "battle," the British rammed the Exodus and stormed it with guns, tear gas and truncheons. Gruber noted that the crew, mostly Jews from America and Palestine, fought back with potatoes, sticks and cans of kosher meat. The second officer, Bill Bernstein of San Francisco, was clubbed to death trying to prevent a British soldier from entering the wheel house. Two orphans were killed, one shot in the face point blank after he tossed an orange at a soldier.

<<<snip>>>

HEAVILY EDITED TO MEET SECTION 107 "FAIR USE" REQUIREMENTS

[Colorado Blue]

37. Why shouldn't people believe this? It's true. The story of

the flight from Europe, from the graveyard of the Holocaust, is true. And it's also true that people were trying to kill the survivors, and that people helping them were in grave danger of their lives. Some were killed, some caught and jailed behind the the Iron Curtain.

But this history is getting lost, and with each day that passes and each venomous word, the stones on history's graveyard are piled higher.

How can 13 million people fight a monster 2,000 years old, when the very people who should be helping them are thrusting the daggers deeper?

[Coastie for Truth]

38. And we still have people defending Ernest Bevin -

[Colorado Blue]

39. Indeed. This article is basically more of the old "What did

you Jews do to make everybody hate you so much" routine.

Phooey.

This might be of interest to folks who are actually interested:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/mandate.html

The record number of immigrants in 1935 (see table) was a response to the growing persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. The British administration considered this number too large, however, so the Jewish Agency was informed that less than one-third of the quota it asked for would be approved in 1936.6 The British gave in further to Arab demands by announcing in the 1939 White Paper that an independent Arab state would be created within 10 years, and that Jewish immigration was to be limited to 75,000 for the next five years, after which it was to cease altogether. It also forbade land sales to Jews in 95 percent of the territory of Palestine. The Arabs, nevertheless, rejected the proposal.

Jewish Immigrants to Palestine

1919 1,806
1920 8,223
1921 8,294
1922 8,685
1923 8,175
1924 13,892
1925 34,386
1926 13,855
1927 3,034
1928 2,178
1929 5,249
1930 4,944
1931 4,075
1932 12,533
1933 37,337
1934 45,267
1935 66,472
1936 29,595
1937 10,629
1938 14,675
1939 31,195
1940 10,643
1941 4,592

By contrast, throughout the Mandatory period, Arab immigration was unrestricted. In 1930, the Hope Simpson Commission, sent from London to investigate the 1929 Arab riots, said the British practice of ignoring the uncontrolled illegal Arab immigration from Egypt, Transjordan and Syria had the effect of displacing the prospective Jewish immigrants.7

The British Governor of the Sinai from 1922-36 observed: “This illegal immigration was not only going on from the Sinai, but also from Transjordan and Syria, and it is very difficult to make a case out for the misery of the Arabs if at the same time their compatriots from adjoining states could not be kept from going in to share that misery.”8 The Peel Commission reported in 1937 that the “shortfall of land is, we consider, due less to the amount of land acquired by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population.”9

snip

After the war, Bevin tried to return Jewish Holocaust refugees to European concentration camps.

[Lithos]

40. The Hope-Simpson report is often misused

First, it makes no claim that uncontrolled or illegal
immigration is occuring by the Arabs, in fact, the language of
the report generally talks about Jewish immigration and its
effects on Arab employment (causing unemployment).  Given the
level of unemployment mentioned as valid inside of this
report, the stories of men actively seeking jobs OUTSIDE of
Palestine (and not coming back), and the detailed summaries in
Appendix 22 & 23 which shows the following information
about immigration/emigration over the time period of 1.11.22
thru 30.4.30:


            Jews  Christians Moslems
Immigrated 81,283      5,370   1,267
Emigrated  23,457      6,198   4,387
Gain/Loss  57,826       (828)  (3120)

Namely, there was no "great" Arab immigration into
Palestine.

[Coastie for Truth]

41. I remember reading Sir John Hope-Simpson's report as

background for some "Engineering and Public Policy" seminar I took ---- 35+ years ago. Looking it over this evening - I find it to be thorough, Malthusian, not too dissimilar from the Club of Rome's "The Limits of Growth" and Jim Kunstler's The Long Emergency.... Both of which - with my myopic, chemical engineer tunnel vision, I disagree.

See, e.g., Chapters V and VI of Sir John's report

Jewish and Arab advantages and disadvantages. (Chapter V.)— The Jewish settlers have had every advantage that capital, science and organization could give them. To these and to the energy of the settlers themselves their remarkable progress is due.

(Chapter VI.)—The Arab has had none of these advantages and has received practically no help to improve his cultivation or his standard of life. The Arab population has increased with great rapidity and the land available for its sustenance has meanwhile decreased by about a million metric dunams which have passed into the hands of the Jews.

I would argue, from Sir John's own findings that unemployment was also due to introduction of new technology:

Arab unemployment.—At the same time there can be no doubt that there is at the present time serious unemployment among Arab craftsmen and among Arab labourers. For this unemployment there are several causes. Motor transport, largely in the hands of the Jews, is driving the camel and the donkey off the roads, and with them the Arab cameldriver and the Arab donkeyman. The motor car, again largely owned and driven by Jews, is displacing the horsedrawn vehicle and its Arab driver. The increased use of cement, reinforced concrete and silicate brick, all manufactured by Jews, is replacing dressed stone for constructional purposes, and so displacing a large number of stonedressers and stonemasons, nearly all of whom are Arabs. The Arab quarrymen are also being displaced.

But probably the most serious cause of additional unemployment is the cessation of conscription for the army, prevalent under the Turkish Government. The young men now remain in the villages. Formerly they were despatched to the Yemen or to Anatolia, and

I could almost make the argument, that the Mandatory Authority wanted to keep the local Arab population subservient.

[Lithos]

42. Employment is a different issue altogether

There is no doubt that the Jewish Labour Force preferred to use Jewish Labor as a matter of policy.

The General Federation of Jewish Labour has adopted a policy which implies the introduction into Palestine of a new social order, based on communal settlements and the principle of selflabour. Where selflabour is impossible, it insists on the employment of Jewish labour exclusively, by all Jewish employers. It has been sufficiently powerful to impose the policy on the Zionist Organisation, to the extent that, as it points out in the memorandum from which a quotation has been given above, 46 of the Zionist colonies are based on the principle of communal settlement. This principle was condemned both by the Experts in their report and by the Joint Palestine Survey Commission, but that fact has had small effect either on the Labour Federation itself or on the Zionist Organisation, for communal labour colonies are still being constructed. p128

It comes down to whether or not the Jewish labour movement discriminated against the existing Arab work force. Hope-Simpson breaks this down into Jewish-centric projects and general work projects. The former is excused from any further discussion due to its non-issue/relevance in this matter except to point out the obvious dualism of the two societies.

The second, general, case is another matter.

I believe your view is partially supported, though I would categorize it as an ethnocentricism where the Jewish Labour group opted to establish settlements using architecture and technology they were more comfortable with. There is also distrust from the earlier riots. As for the cause of the riots which appears to be affecting the use of Arab labor.

[Colorado Blue]

43. Respectfully, Benny Morris mentions "tens of thousands"

of immigrants. Winston Churchill himself remarked on the situation, declaring that the Jews were being punished for the immigration they themselves had helped create.

This is in the records of the British Empire.

[Violet_Crumble]

45. Winston Churchill also commented about gassing Arabs...

Along the lines of it's okay to gas those pesky Arabs. Yep, he's one mighty fine and upstanding source on issues relating to Arabs! ;)

btw, where did Benny Morris mention "tens of thousands"? I'd be curious to read it in its actual context.



'According to the Zionist myth, only modern Jewish colonization brought about the economic development of Palestine and improved the hard conditions there. These developments, it was said, attracted poor Arabs from the stagnant neighbouring countries. Their numbers grew faster than the Jewish immigrants because the malicious British authorities always encouraged them to come and did much to help to absorb them, both economically and legally.

<snip>

The strength of the process of natural increase was finally proved not elsewhere but in Israel itself. In 1949 there were about 150,000 Arabs in Israel within the 1949 armistice lines. To that number, one has to add the 20,000-odd refugees who returned to the state as part of the government’s scheme for the “reunion of families.” The Israeli authorities cannot be blamed, as the British “imperialists” were, for helping the Arabs enter the country. And despite the strict controls of Israel’s borders, the numbers of Arabs living in Israel proper has more than trebled since. The rate of the Israeli Arabs’ natural increase rose sharply (between 1964 and 1966 it reached the world record of 4.5 percent a year) and brought about the remarkable increase in the size of that community. No Egyptians, Bedouins, Syrians, Bosnians, etc, were needed.'

Mrs. Peters's Palestine by Yehoshua Porath.

[Lithos]

47. He didn't make this claim

He stated that there were those in the Israeli government who were making this claim. He was not reporting this as fact, just reporting that there were those in the Israeli government who believed this as fact.

L-

[Colorado Blue]

50. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited

Page 17 (from the paperback version published in 2004 by the Cambridge University Press):

Morris states the increases in population began in the 19th century and continued through the Mandate years.

This section of the book is extremely valuable because it points out the fact that that Palestinian society was diverse, in a state of flux; and also deeply divided. He says,

"...The rifts in Palestinian society - between town and country, Husseinis and Nashibishis, Muslims and Christians, beduin and settled communities - were rooted in history." This ultimately resulted in a great deal of internal conflict as well as conflict with Jewish indigenes and immigrants, and with the British.

He continues by describing a drift from the countryside into the towns, as urbanization gradually increased, during the last decades of the 19th centuries and the beginnings of the 20th:

"In part, they were attracted by the economic benefits that flowed from newly developed commercial ties with Europe...in part they were driven from the countryside by Ottoman taxation and indebtedness, and land purchases by Arab effendis (many outside Palestine) and Zionists..."

"But it is well to recognise that there was also a parallel process at work during the 19th century, namely the immigration to Palestine of tens of thousands of Maghrebi (North African), Egyptian, Bosnian, Kurdish and Caucasian peasants and beduin tribes, either on their own volition or by Ottoman design. Many of these immigrants established new villages...Later, the relative prosperity and order of Mandate Palestine drew thousands of additional Arab immigrants from the neighbouring countries, especially to the large towns."

He is trying to describe a gradual, but accelerating process of change, of growing urbanization, a loosening of traditional reliance on the soil, an influx of new people who founded their own villages, new opportunities and new ways, which created a complex and often volatile matrix and ultimately, conflict.

[Colorado Blue]

44. Per Churchill on immigration:

Winston Churchill said in 1939, "So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population."

Respectfully, there is considerable dispute on this topic (illegal Arab immigration).

[Lithos]

46. The statistics do not bear this out, I'm afraid

Churchill was a politician who had many people vying for his ear and offering much in the way of information. From the Hope-Simpson document, there is mention that even in 1930, there were already myths concerning what was going on with respect to Palestine, particularly w/r to immigration and employment. This debate about Palestine is not a new one, nor one that arose even with Joan Peters who was an ardent proponent, but is as old as the first few Aliyahs.

Obviously Churchill was not on the ground in Palestine at this time and considering his long and positive opinion of the Jewish Zionist efforts for which he on more than one occasion became personally involved, he would have been predisposed to take as facts what were instead opinions. It could not be otherwise, for if he were to be quoting it as government created "fact, then he would have undoubtedly relied on British Colonial documents. These very records have been examined carefully by academics of the likes of Porat and company and have demonstrated quite clearly Arab immigration was insigificant, trivial at best when compared to the internal growth rate of the Arab population.

[Colorado Blue]

49. According to Howard M. Sachar's book, which is a huge

and heavily researched, scholarly document, immigration was actually around 100,000 during the Mandate years.

The point is, illegal immigration wasn't tracked and OFFICIALLY documented. It was difficult at the best of times to obtain official census records because people tended to disappear when the authorities arrived in the vicinity.

Therefore of course it wouldn't show up. But there were other indications, from people who were actually WERE on the ground. And one of the most telling disparities lies in the sheer number of refugees after 1948, which indicates a major disparity between official numbers and actual numbers, as well as the fact that the UN was allowing people who'd only been resident in the Mandate since 1946, to qualify as refugees - a clear indication that people were arriving all the time.

Sachar's book is "A History of Israel From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time," second edition, revised and updated, Knopf, New York, 2002.

He's written at least 13 books, and according to the cover notes, studied at Swarthmore and Harvard and is Charles E. Smith Professor of History at George Washington University. He also serves as a consultant and lecturer for Middle East affairs for numerous US government bodies, and lectures widely at universities in the US and abroad.

[Colorado Blue]

52. This is a pretty fair online analysis, I think:

http://www.mideastweb.org/palpop.htm

[Englander]

48. What's the source for that quote?

I thought I'd pop in here & ask what the original source for the Churchill
quote is. I know it's taken from the Peters book*, I was wondering what the
original quote & context is? The article I found from the Xtian Zionist site
that mentions the quote doesn't list the notes, it doesn't mention the source.

Since you're using Ms Peters book as a reference, here's a review of the
Revisionist tome;

'Mrs. Peters's Palestine

>snip

Much of Mrs. Peters's book argues that at the same time that Jewish immigration to Palestine was rising, Arab immigration to the parts of Palestine where Jews had settled also increased. Therefore, in her view, the Arab claim that an indigenous Arab population was displaced by Jewish immigrants must be false, since many Arabs only arrived with the Jews. The precise demographic history of modern Palestine cannot be summed up briefly, but its main features are clear enough and they are very different from the fanciful description Mrs. Peters gives. It is true that in the middle of the nineteenth century there was neither a "Palestinian nation" nor a "Palestinian identity." But about four hundred thousand Arabs—the great majority of whom were Muslims — lived in Palestine, which was divided by the Ottomans into three districts. Some of these people were the descendants of the pre-Islamic population that had adopted Islam and the Arabic language; others were members of Bedouin tribes, although the penetration of Bedouins was drastically curtailed after the mid-nineteenth century, when the Ottoman authorities became stronger and more efficient.

As all the research by historians and geographers of modern Palestine shows, the Arab population began to grow again in the middle of the nineteenth century. That growth resulted from a new factor: the demographic revolution. Until the 1850s there was no "natural" increase of the population, but this began to change when modern medical treatment was introduced and modern hospitals were established, both by the the Ottoman authorities and by the foreign Christian missionaries. The number of births remained steady but infant mortality decreased. This was the main reason for Arab population growth, not incursions into the country by the wandering tribes who by then had become afraid of the much more efficient Ottoman troops. Toward the end of Ottoman rule the various contemporary sources no longer lament the outbreak of widespread epidemics. This contrasts with the Arabic chronicles of previous periods in which we find horrible descriptions of recurrent epidemics — typhoid, cholera, bubonic plague—decimating the population. Under the British Mandate, with still better sanitary conditions, more hospitals, and further improvements in medical treatment, the Arab population continued to grow.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/5249

___________________________________


*

Extract from 'From Time Immemorial'

http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~peters/immigration.html

[Colorado Blue]

51. I don't use Ms. Peters as a source. I believe she's been

widely discredited.

The quote is from Sir Martin Gilbert's "Israel: A History".

Gilbert is the official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill as I'm sure you're aware.

[Englander]

55. So, where did Gilbert get the quote?

I was asking what the original source & context for the quote was, I'd
like to know where, & in what context the quote is taken from. If, as you
claim, it's from Gilbert's book, does he provide a footnote? I mean, I didn't
intend to impugn yer integrity, or anything, I was just trying to ascertain
what the source for the Churchill quote is. I would like to know which speech,
or papers it's taken from. If you can't/won't provide that, that's fair enough.
Did you look at the link I provided? It showed that the quote was taken from the
Peters book. The article linked was an extract from the Peters book, with the
exact same quote that you posted. I wasn't sure if you'd realised that.

[Colorado Blue]

58. I gave away my copy of Gilbert's book and I've ordered another.

I've had so many books in my lifetime and often had to move, and have lived in very small spaces from time to time, so my library waxes and wanes accordingly.

I will get back to you when my new copies arrive, with the exact footnotes.

But, in the interim, perhaps you might avail yourself of Gilbert's books. As he was the official biographer of Winston Churchill, I doubt he got the quote from Ms. Peters.

[Englander]

60. Then, I must say, CB, that I congratulate you on your memory.

If you were able to quote from the Gilbert book, & get the Churchill quote
exactly correct, whilst not having the book to hand, that is *most* impressive.
So, shall I bookmark this thread, & you can provide the source for the Churchill
quote, when these new copies arrive? Or, perhaps, I might find myself a copy of
Gilbert's book, & try & find where he mentions this particular Churchill quote?

--As he was the official biographer of Winston Churchill, I doubt he got the quote from Ms. Peters.--

Who said anything about Gilbert quoting from Peters book? I said that the Zionist site
I linked to, showed that the quote you posted was taken from the Peters book. Which you
still haven't acknowledged or addressed, that the quote you posted is mentioned in the
Peters book. All I wanted to know is which speech the quote is taken from, all this dancing
around the issue is entertaining, but it doesn't answer my question.

[Colorado Blue]

63. Englander, sir, I still don't understand what Peters or anybody

else has to do with any of this.

Gilbert is Churchill's official biographer.

Just because a quote shows up in a book or on a site that YOU think is "right wing", whatever that means these days (?) doesn't mean it's innaccurate, didn't exist, or somebody (implication) just made it up out of thin air.

Churchill led the opposition to the White Paper of 1939. He made a speech, May 23, 1939, to the House of Commons, in which he also said:

"'...I could not stand by and see solemn engagements into which Britain has entered before the world set aside for reasons of administrative convenience...." Churchill made the comment in his speech against the White Paper which stipulated an end to Jewish immigration to Palestine in five years by a majority decision of the population.'" (winstonchurchill.org)

I do not believe Gilbert - or Peters for that matter - is making this up. Is that what you are implying? Or are you implying that, because YOU do not approve of a website's putatitve political orientation, or the books, that the comment isn't valid?

You can't just ignore history because you don't like the sources quoted.

Meanwhile, let's see what else was going on in 1939, It won't all fit here so please see the following post(s). I think it's important to put the struggle over the White Paper, and Churchill's opposition, and the desperate situation of the Jewish people both in Europe and under attack in the Mandate, into perspective.

[Colorado Blue]

66. self delete, wrong place

[Colorado Blue]

67. In view of the actions of the REAL Nazis, I submit that the

author of the original post is completely lacking in historical perspective.

If this is what passes for philosophy these days we are doomed. And if people have grown up without any sense whatsoever about the crisis faced by Churchill, by the people of Europe and especially by the Jews, then we are doubly doomed.

We cannot discuss ANYTHING to do with contemporary times unless we understand the past. It's pretty obvious that some of us don't get it, not even a little bit.

***

The history of Europe intermeshes with the history of Mandate Palestine. Everything that happened there must be seen in this larger perspective, as well as in the broader perspective of the Middle East.

Just in the past few days, we've seen horrific events, terrible sectarian violence, unfold in Iraq. One nationstate has threatened to eliminate another, and to retaliate against its nuclear reactor and refineries should a THIRD state, attack it in any attempt to control nuclear proliferation.

Time has now telescoped. We will see what happens next. But we are not dealing with matters that can be controlled by pointing fingers at websites or complaining because this or that website is "Zionist" or this or that author is "right wing," any more than hemming and hawing and appeasement could control Hitler in the thirties.

The sweep of history and the forces that were unleased, and which swirl again anew, are too vast and inexorable for petty bitching about little matters.

[Englander]

70. Are you drunk? n/t

[Violet_Crumble]

72. Lithos has already told you that Churchill was quoting Israeli leaders...

That quote you posted as being Churchill's opinion actually wasn't his opinion at all, but him quoting Israeli leaders opinions. For someone to have claimed to have read a book where this would have been clear, and then to repost it as though it were Churchill's opinion is misleading and what I believe is known as taking words out of context....

Also, what Joan Peters has to do with this is that you have been using the exact same arguments that she did to try to promote some now debunked version of history where there was massive Arab migration to Palestine...

Violet...

[Colorado Blue]

64. 1939....it was a very bad year (but it got worse)

January

The Ahnenerbe is officially incorporated into the SS and its leaders absorbed into Himmler's personal staff. At that time it has 50 branches under the direction of Professor Wurst, an expert on ancient sacred texts who had taught Sanskrit at Munich University. (Pauwels)

1939 January 1 A decree is published eliminating Jews from the German economy.
1939 January 5 Polish Foreign Minister Joseph Beck confers with Hitler at Berchtesgaden. Hitler says he is considering a formula that would make Danzig politically German and economically Polish, and that he is ready to give a formal and clear guarantee for the German-Polish frontiers. (Sturdza)
1939 January 6 Beck and Ribbentrop meet in Munich. Ribbentrop asks for "the reunion of Danzig with Germany" and proposes a number of guarantees.
1939 January 9 The Reich Office of Racial Research exempts Karaites from antisemitic legislation. (Edelheit)
1939 January 10 Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax arrive in Rome to meet with Mussolini.
1939 January 11 The Danzig Senate orders 1,000 of the 4,000 Jews still in Danzig to leave by the end of the month.
1939 January 14 Pope Pius XI urges foreign diplomats at the Vatican to grant as many visas as possible to victims of German and Italian racial prejudice. (Edelheit)
1939 January 17 Denmark, Latvia and Estonia sign a nonagression pact with Germany. Norway, Sweden and Finland insist on strict neutrality.
1939 January 17 Slovakian premier, Father Tiso, declares his foremost task is to solve the "Jewish question."
1939 January 17 The eighth ordinance of the Reich Citizenship Act is passed, barring Jewish dentists, veterinarians and chemists from practicing their professions. Jewish dentists may only treat Jewish patients.
1939 January 19 Hjalmar Schacht has his last meeting with George Rublee in Berlin. (Architect)
1939 January 21 Hitler dismisses Hjalmar Schacht as president of the Reichsbank and replaces him with Walter Funk. Schacht was left as an unpaid minister without portfolio until 1943. (Children)
(Note: A secret report to Hitler, prepared by Himmler, had accused Schacht of being disloyal to Nazi interests in his negotiations with George Rublee.) (Architect)
1939 January 21 Hitler tells Czech foreign minister Chvalkovsy, "We are going to destroy the Jews -- they are not going to get away with what they did on November 9, 1918. The day of reckoning has come."
1939 January 23 Chamberlain announces the introduction of National Service and says, "It is a project that must make us prepared for war."
1939 January 24 Goering orders Reinhard Heidrich to establish the Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration is established to organize and accelerate the emigration of the Jews. Heydrich names Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller to head the department. Almost 80,000 Jews will leave Germany in 1939. (Days)
(Note: Goering commissions Heydrich to bring the "Jewish question to as favorable a solution as present circumstances permit.") (Apparatus)
1939 January 24 Germany and Poland reach an agreement on Jewish deportees. One thousand Jews at a time may return to Germany to settle their accounts. A special proprietary account for this purpose will be set up in Germany for deposits only. (Edelheit)
1939 January 26 General Franco's forces capture Barcelona.
1939 January 27 Ribbentrop repeats Germany's Danzig proposals in Warsaw.
1939 January 28 Chamberlain tells as audience in Birmingham that Great Britain must prepare herself to defend not only her territory but also "the principle of Liberty."
1939 January 30 Hitler, in an address to the Reichstag, gives public notice of his intentions, "If international Jewry should succeed in Europe or elsewhere, in precipitating nations into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of Europe and a victory for Judaism, but the extermination of the Jewish race." Hitler also comments on the lack of offers from the so-called democratic states to accept Jewish refugees.
1939 January 30 Archbishop Groeber in a pastoral letter concedes that Jesus Christ could not be made into an "Aryan," but the son of God had been fundamentally different from the Jews of his time -- so much so that they had hated him and demanded his crucifixion, and "their murderous hatred has continued in later centuries." (Lewy)

1939 January-February For the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Treaty, Pope Pius XI drafts a discourse that is said to have condemned totalitarianism in the strongest terms. After his death (February 10), his successor, Pius XII, chooses not to deliver the speech. (Lewy)
1939 February For the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Treaty, Pope Pius XI drafts a discourse that is said to have condemned totalitarianism in the strongest terms. After his death, his successor, Pius XII, chooses not to deliver the speech. (Lewy)
1939 February 3 A bomb thrown into a Budapest synagogue kills one Jewish worshipper and injures many others. (Atlas)
1939 February 5 Karl Wolff, Chief Adjutant of Himmler's person staff, informs Weisthor's SS staff by letter that Weisthor (Wiligut) has retired on his own application for reasons of age and poor health and that his SS office will be dissolved. (Berlin Document Center; Roots)
1939 February Otto Rahn unexpectedly resigns from the SS. (See February 5 and March 13) (Rahn file, Berlin Document Center; Roots)
1939 February 6 Einsatz des Juedischen Vermoegens is published, decreeing complete "Aryanization" of Jewish property in the Reich. (Edelheit)
1939 February 6 Bishop Hilfrich of Limburg is a pastoral letter writess that Jesus had been a Jew, but "the Christian religion has not grown out of the nature of this people, that is, is not influenced by their racial characteristics. Rather it has had to make its way against this people." Christianity, the bishop concludes, is not to be regarded as a product of the Jews; it is not a foreign doctrine or un-German. "Once accepted by our ancestors, it finds itself in the most intimate union with the Germanic spirit." (Lewy)
1939 February 7 Alfred Rosenberg, at a press conference in Berlin, discusses a plan to settle all 15 million of the world's Jews on the island of Madegascar.
1939 February 8 Six members of the Romanian Legion of St. Michael (Iron Guard) are arrested in Romania and later murdered by Armand Calinescu's police.
1939 February 10 Pope Pius XI dies.
1939 February 11 The tenth anniversary of the Lateran Treaty.
1939 February 11 At the first meeting of the Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration, Heydrich orders officials to proceed as if an agreement with the intergovernmental committee does not exist. (Architect)
1939 February 15 Count Pal Teleki takes office as Hungary's prime minister.
1939 February 20 A pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in New York draws 20,000 Nazi sympathizers and supporters of Father Charles Coughlin.
1939 February 21 German Jews are ordered to surrender all gold and silver, except wedding rings.
1939 February 22 Neville Chamberlain tells an audience in Blackburn, "Ships, guns and ammunition are produced by our shipyards and factories with an increased acceleration... Even if the whole world is against us we will win."
1939 February 24 Hungary joins the Anti-Comintern Pact and outlaws the Arrow Cross.
1939 February 26 The British government submits a proposal calling for an independent Palestine state allied to Britain. (Edelheit)
1939 February 27 Britain and France recognize the Franco government in Spain.

1939 March 1 Romania announces that 43,000 Jews have been denationalized.
1939 March 2 Papal Secretary of State Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli is elected to succeed Pius XI as pope. He becomes Pope Pius XII.
1939 March 4 Germany introduces a compulsory labor law for Jews, but does not allow them to become part of the German Labor Service (Arbeitdienst).
1939 March 6 Armand Calinescu becomes Prime Minister of Romania after the death of Patriarch Cristea.
1939 March 10 The Eighteenth Communist Party Congress opens in Moscow.
1939 March 10 Slovak Prime Minister Josef Tiso is dismissed by the Czech central government in Prague.
1939 March 11 Ousted Slovak Prime Minister Tiso meets with Hitler in Berlin.
1939 March 12 Prime Minister Chamberlain makes a public pledge of support for Polish sovereignty in Parliament. This speech has been called one of the most important expressions of England's support for Polish independence. (Duffy)
1939 March 13 Otto Rahn dies of overexposure while hiking in the mountains near Kufstein. (Berlin Document Center) Rumors persist that he was murdered by the SS.
1939 March 14 Monsignor Josef Tiso proclaims the independence of Slovakia and establishes an independent Axis state under the Fascist Hlinka Party. Slovak Nazis launch a wave of terror against Slovakian Jews.
(Note: After the war, Tiso will be arrested, imprisoned and executed by the Communist government in Prague.)
1939 March 15 Civil unrest forces President Hacha of Czechoslovakia to ask for German protection. German troops enter Prague, and Bohemia becomes a German Protectorate. Konstantin von Neurath is appointed "Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia." Some 56,000 Jews are trapped, many of them refugees from Germany and Austria who had fled to Bohemia and Moravia only the year before. Adolf Eichmann soon sets up a Jewish emigration office in Prague. (Atlas)
(Note: Britain and France complain that the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia is a violation of the Munich Agreement but fail to take a firm stand.)
1939 March 16 Hungarian troops occupy Czechoslovakian Carpatho-Ruthenia.
1939 March 16 Hitler declares that Czechoslovakia no longer exists.
1939 March 17 Neville Chamberlain publicly accuses Hitler of breaking his promises made at the Munich Conference.
1939 March 20 The U.S. ambassador to Germany is recalled to protest the dissolution of Czechoslovakia.
1939 March 20 Reichprotector von Neurath bans all "unofficial Aryanization" of Jewish property in former Czechoslovakian territrories. All Jews are dismissed from their jobs as municipal employees.
1939 March 21 Nazis seize the Free City of Memel (Lithuania).
1939 March 21 Sir Howard Kennard, British Ambassador in Warsaw, offers in the name of his government, what is called a Pact of Consultation and Resistance that includes Great Britain, France, Poland and the Soviet Union.
1939 March 23 Germany annexes Memel and Hitler demands access to the Polish Corridor, the narrow strip of land that since the Treaty of Versailles has separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Nazi harassment forces thousands of Jews to flee Memel to Lithuania.
1939 March 23 The Polish government rejects Germany's proposals for Danzig.
1939 March 23 An economic agreement between Germany and Romania gives Hitler access to Romanian oil.
1939 March 24 Miuroslav Arciczewski, the Polish Undersecretary of State, complains to the German Ambassador about British and French intrigues in Warsaw, "which don't take into consideration the dangers to which Poland is exposed." (Sturdza)
1939 March 25 The Vatican recognizes Monseignor Tiso's recently founded Slovakia.
1939 March 26 Polish Ambassador Lipski inBerlin completely rejects Germany's proposals of October 1938. Beck refuses to even meet with Hitler, and instructs Lipski to tell Ribbentrop that if Germany continues to insist on the idea of a German Danzig... it would mean war.
1939 March 28 General Franco occupies Madrid, and the Spanish Civil War comes to an end. Franco assumes complete control.
1939 March 31 Britain and France sign an agreement with Poland guaranteeing its borders against aggression. These "unconditional" guarantees concern only Poland's western border, not its frontiers with the Soviet Union.
(Note: David Lloyd George warns the British parliament that the agreement with Poland is meaningless without Russia's cooperation.)
1939 March 31 Neville Chamberlain tells the House of Commons that the British government considers itself bound to come immediately to Poland's aid the moment the Polish government feels its existence is in danger. The news of Chamberlain's guarantee throws Hitler into a rage. (Shirer I)
1939 March 31 Germany and Spain conclude a Treaty of Friendship.

1939 April 1 Hitler tells General Keitel that it is a shame that "sly, old Marshal Pilsudski," with whom he had signed a nonaggression pact, had died so prematurely, but the same could happen to him at any time, and that is why it is so important to resolve the problem of East Prussia as soon as possible.
1939 April 2 Nazis fail to win seats in the Belgian House of Deputies.
1939 April 3 Hitler issues a war directive marked "Most Secret" and has it delivered by hand to his senior war commanders. "Since the situation on Germany's eastern frontier has become intolerable and all political possibilities have been exhausted," it began, "I have decided upon a solution by force." Preparations for the attack on Poland, "Case White" (Operation White), "must be made so that the operation can be carried out any time from September 1, 1939." (Shirer I)
1939 April 4 The Godesberg Declaration accepts the Nazis world view (Weltanschauung).
1939 April 6 Italy issues an ultimatum to King Zogu I of Albania.
1939 April 6 Polish Foreign Minister Beck signs a temporary mutual assistance pact in London, but since Beck fears the Soviets as much or more than the Nazis, it excludes any Soviet participation.
1939 April 7 Mussolini's occupies Albania, and soon annexes it to Italy.
1939 April 7 The Franco government in Spain joins Germany, Italy and Japan in the Anti-Comintern Pact.
1939 April 11 Hitler issues a directive for Operation White, a proposed plan to attack Poland.
1939 April 11 Hungary withdraws from the League of Nations.
1939 April 13 Britain and France counter Mussolini's threats with a guarantee to protect the sovereignty of Greece and Romania.
1939 April 15 President Roosevelt appeals to both Hitler and Mussolini for assurances against any further aggression, telling them both there is no need for war and to respect the independence of other nations, specifically naming thirty-one countries in Europe and the Near East. Soon afterward Hitler ridicules Roosevelt during a speech to the Reichstag by sarcastically reinterating the thirty-one nations listed in Roosevelt's appeal. The Reichstag burst into laughter at the seemingly endless list.
1939 April 15 Alfred Rosenberg opens the Institute of the Nazi Party for Research into the Jewish Question (Institut der NSDAP zur Erforschung der Judenfrage).
1939 April 16 After Franco, with the help of Hitler and Mussolini, has successfully defeated the "Loyalists," Pope Pius XII sends the Spanish Catholics his expressions of "immense joy" and "fatherly congratulations for the gift of peace and victory with which God has deigned to crown the Christian heroism of your faith and charity, proved through such great and generous sufferings." (Lewy)
1939 April 17 Britain and France reject a Soviet offer to form an anti-Nazi alliance.
1939 April 17 Soviet Ambassador Alexei Merekalov calls on Ribbentrop's chief subordinate, Baron von Weizacher and offers unmistakable signals that Russia is now willing to develop better relations with Germany.
1939 April 18 In Berlin, Hitler warns Grigore Gafencu, Romania's new Foreign Minister that "Romania will be abandoned by the covetousness of its neighbors" and again offers military aid and support against Soviet aggression.
1939 April 19 Hitler tells Gregoire Gafencu he cannot understand why the English cannot see that he only wishes to reach an agreement with them.... But if England wants war she can have it.
1939 April 20 Hitler celebrates his 50th birthday with the largest military display in German history. It is a clear warning to his enemies.
1939 April 20 Joint hearings of the U.S. House and Senate are held concerning the admission, on a non-quota basis, of 20,000 German Jewish children over a two-year period.
1939 April 24 A new Slovakian decree dismisses Jews from the civil service and corporation staffs.
1939 April 27 Britain enacts the Concsription Law, ordering compulsory military service.
1939 April 27 Hitler denounces the 1935 British-German naval agreement.
1939 April 28 In a worldwide radio broadcast from the Reichstag, Hitler rejects Roosevelt's appeal for peace and denounces what he calls Britain's new foreign policy. He also annuls the German-Plish nonagression Pact and denounces the British-Polish Pact. (See April 14)
1939 April 28 Sudeten-German Nazis incite anti-Jewish riots in Jihlava (Iglau), Czechoslovakia. Many Jewish shops and stores are damaged. (Edelheit)
1939 April 30 A new German decree causes Jews lose their right to rent protection. Landlords are sanctioned by law to evict Jewish tenants. (Persecution)
1939 April The first regular television broadcasts begin in the United States.

1939 May Hitler orders his personal physician, Dr. Karl Brandt, to devise a new program for the killing of sick and disabled German children.
1939 May The British government sets a limit of 75,000 Jewish refugees into Palestine over the next five years.
1939 May Stalin's purges have by now cut across Russian society. A total of 98 of the 139 central committee members elected in 1934 have been shot and 1,108 of the 1,966 delegates to the 17th Congress arrested. The secret-police reign of terror annihilates a large portion of every profession. Deaths have been estimated in the millions, including those who perished in concentration camps.
1939 May 3 Maxim Litvinov, a Jew and Soviet Foreign Minister for eighteen years, is replaced by Stalin with Vyacheslav M. Molotov, a gentile. Hitler is said to have been greatly pleased that Stalin seemed to be removing the last Bolshevik Jews from positions of power.
(Note: Molotov will serve as Foreign Minister from 1939-49 and again from 1953-56. Litvinov will become Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. 1941.) (Ickes)
1939 May 3 Hungary enacts antisemitic laws similar to the Nuremberg Laws. Hungarian Jews are forbidden to become Judges, lawyers, schoolteachers, or members of Parliament. Those who converted to Christianity before 1919 and Jewish war veterans are exempted.
1939 May 4 A second anti-Jewish law in Hungary deprives Jews naturalized after July 1, 1914 of their citizenship.
1939 May 4 The Housing Segregation Law is enacted in Germany. (Edelheit)
1939 May 6 Mussolini commits himself to sign an armistice with Hitler. It will be a fateful decision. (Shirer I)
1939 May 8 Spain withdraws from the League of Nations.
1939 May 12 Britain and Turkey sign a mutual assistance pact.
1939 May 13 The Hungarian Union of Jewish Communities, in response to a massive surge in conversions to Christianity, implores Jews not to abandon the faith of their fathers and the Jewish people.
1939 May 15 The S.S. St. Louis, loaded with 930 Jewish refugees, leaves Hamburg bound for Cuba.
1939 May 15 Ravensbrueck, a concentration camp for women, is established.
1939 May 17 A German census lists 330,539 Jews in Greater Germany; 138,819 males and 191,720 females. These figures include 94,530 Jews in what was formerly Austria and 2,363 in the Sudetenland.
1939 May 17 Sweden, Norway and Finland announce they will remain firmly neutral.
1939 May 18 Julius Streicher's Der Stuermer calls for the extermination of all Jews in the Soviet Union, saying it is the only way to eliminate Bolshevism.
1939 May 18 Britain reinstates compulsory military conscription.
1939 May 19 Franco's Spanish Nationalists stage a huge parade in Madrid.
1939 May 20 Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov invites German Ambassador von der Schulenburg to meet with his staff in the Kremlin. This is the beginning of Soviet plans for setting up a Soviet-German nonaggression pact.
1939 May 20 Pan American Airways launches the first commercial trans-Atlantic flight. The Yankee Clipper flies from New York to Portugal.
1939 May 22 Hitler and Mussolini sign the "Pact of Steel," proclaiming their full military alliance.
1939 May 23 The British parliament approves the so-called "White Paper" by a vote of 268 to 179. This document proposes slowing the growth of the Jewish community in Palestine by limiting Jewish immigration and cutting back Jewish purchases of land. The House of Commons approves a plan for an independent Palestinian state by 1949, but the plan is denounced by both Arabs and Jews.
1939 May 23 Hitler tells a gathering of his highest-level military officers, "The Britisher himself is proud, brave, tough, dogged and a gifted organizer. He knows how to exploit every new development. He has the love of adventure and the courage of the Nordic race... England is a world power in herself. Constant for three hundred years. Increased by alliances. This power is not only something concrete, but must also be considered as a psychological force, embracing the entire world. Add to this immeasurable wealth and the solvency that goes with it and geopolitical security and protection by a strong sea power and courageous air force." (Shirer I)
1939 May 23 Hitler orders the Military High Command to prepare for war with Poland. Goebbels propaganda machine begins accusing the Poles of committing atrocities against their German-speaking minority. (Goebbels)
1939 May 26 Ribbentrop instructs Schulenburg to inform Molotov that Germany's hostility to the Comintern will be abandoned if Hitler can be assured that the Soviets have, in fact, renounced their aggressive struggle against Germany as indicated by Stalin's recent speech.
1939 May 27 The Cuban government refuses to admit the 930 Jewish refugees onboard the S.S. St. Louis. (See May 15)
1939 May 28 The Arrow Cross Party elects 45 representatives to the Hungarian parliament.
1939 May 29 President of the Hungarian Senate, Count Julius Karolyi, resigns in opposition to his country's new anti-Jewish laws.
1939 May 31 Hundreds of commercial licenses held by Jews are cancelled after the Hungarian Ministry of Commerce applies strict numerus clausus to Jewish businesses.

1939 June 1 General Oswald Pohl is named chief administrator of the SS.
1939 June 1 Italian Jews are ordered to assume "Jewish" surnames. Collaboration between Jewish and non-Jewish professionals is prohibited. (Edelheit)
1939 June 1 The SS-Gericht, the SS Legal Head Office, is established on Himmler's orders.
1939 June 2 The Cuban government forces the S.S. St. Louis to leave Havana harbor. (See May 27)
1939 June 3-4 The U.S. government refuses to admit the 930 Jews on the S.S. St. Louis, even those with valid American quota numbers. All requests go unheeded as the ship sails northward along the Florida coast.
1939 June 6 President Roosevelt ignores a telegram sent on behalf of the Jews aboard the S.S. St. Louis. The ship, with all 930 Jews on board, is forced to return to Europe.
1939 June 7 Britain's King George VI and Queen Elizabeth arrive in America for a state visit and public relations campaign.
1939 June 12 Romania imposes a special tax on denationalized Jews, ranging from 2,000 to 10,000 lei annually.
1939 June 13 Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands (Holland) agree to take in the Jews aboard the S.S. St. Louis. Those who find shelter on the Continent will come under German control in the summer of 1940 and most will later be murdered in the concentration camps.
1939 June 18 A bomb explodes in a Jewish cafe in Prague, injuring 39 people.
1939 June 20 General Walther von Brauchitsch issues a directive ordering cooperation between the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS (SS- Verfuegungstruppen).

1939 June 20 Professor Fischer says in a lecture: "When a people wants, somehow or other, to preserve its own nature, it must reject alien racial elements, and when these have already insinuated themselves, it must suppress them and eliminate them. The Jew is such an alien and, therefore, when he wants to insinuate himself, he must be warded off. This is self-defence. In saying this, I do not characterize every Jew as inferior, as Negroes are, and I do not underestimate the greatest enemy with whom we have to fight. But I reject Jewry with every means in my power, and without reserve, in order to preserve the hereditary endowment of my people." (Science)

1939 June 22 Slovak Minister of Propaganda Aleksander Mach proclaims that with a year Slovakia with be cleansed of Jews (Judenrein).
1939 June 29 The first group of Gypsy women from Austria are sent to Ravensbrueck concentration camp. They number some 440.
1939 June 30 A fire destroys part of the Jewish district in Silal, Lithuania. Arson is suspected.

1939 Summer A public announcement is printed: "The German Society of Race-hygiene is to organize the Fourth International Congress of Eugenics in Vienna on 26-28 August 1940. The President of the Congress will be Professor Rüdin." (Science)
1939 July 4 The tenth ordinance of the Reich Citizenship Act creates the Reich Association of Jews in Germany (Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland), replacing all other Jewish organizations. All German Jews are forced to become members of the new association. (Persecution)
1939 July 6 Adolf Eichmann arrives in Prague to take charge of Jewish emigration.
1939 July 7 An editorial in the Völkischer Beobachter states that the Jewish problem in Germany will be solved only when Germany is cleansed of Jews.
1939 July 7 The ban against Action Francaise is lifted just four months after the election of Pope Pius XII, who was even more convinced of the usefulness of anti-Communist right-wing movements than his predecessor. (Lewy)
1939 July 8 Italian companies dealing with the government are prohibited from employing Jews. (Edelheit)
1939 July 9 Churchill urges a British military alliance with the Soviet Union.
1939 July 10 Niculetta Nicolescu, head of the women's branch of the Legionary Movement in Romania is arrested and and tortured. Her breasts are cut off and she is put to death after being raped. (Sturdza)
1939 July 12 Chamberlain tells the House of Commons that: "The present status of Danzig could not be considered as illegal or unjust... We hope that the Free City will prove once more that different nationalities can collaborate when their interests demand it."
1939 July 13 Italy an "Aryanization" program similar to the one in Germany.
1939 July 15 A Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle fuer Juedische Auswanderung) opens in Prague under the direction of Adolf Eichmann. A branch office is set up in Brno. All Jews wishiung to emigrate from the Czech Protectorate must request permission from these offices.
1939 July 16 Sir Oswald Mosley declares that one million British Fascists will refuse to fight in a "Jewish war."
1939 July 17 Cardinal Bertram sends instructions marked "Top Secret" to the German bishops informing them where priests should report for military pastoral care in case of war. (Lewy)
1939 July 23 Britain and France agree to Russia's proposal that military staff talks be held at once to spell out specifically how Hitler's armies are to be met by the three nations (See August 5). (Shirer I)
1939 July 24 A numerus clausus is instituted in Slovakia, restricting Jews in the professions to four percent. another Slovak decree dismisses all Jews from the army.
1939 July 26 The United States rescinds the 1911 trade agreement with Japan.
1939 July 29 Jews in Slovakia are forbidden to live in rural areas.
1939 July 30 Elections are held for the Twenty-first Zionist Congress to be held in Geneva.

1939 August Stalin, who has become convinced that Britain and France are conspiring to help throw the full weight of German strength against the USSR, seeks an accommodation with Hitler despite their bitterly antagonistic ideologies.
1939 August 1 The U.S. Congress passes a bill outlawing the use of uniforms and firearms by any organization conflicting with the American government. (Edelheit)
1939 August 2 After a lengthy debate the House of Commons votes itself a summer holiday. It is not scheduled to return until October 21.
1939 August 2 Albert Einstein writes a letter to President Roosevelt, warning him of the possibility that Nazi Germany might be attempting to build an atom bomb. "This new phenomena (atomic energy) would also lead to the construction of bombs. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port, together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air." Roosevelt soon issues orders for a U.S. effort to investigate building an atomic bomb. (Howarth)
1939 August 3 Following a secret meeting in London between German Ambassador Herbert von Dirksen and Sir Horace Wilson, head of Britain's civil service and Chamberlain's closest adviser, a message is sent to Hitler informing him that Britain is prepared to increase trade with Germany, talk constructively about Germany's need for colonies, take a helpful view of Germany's need for expansion in southeast Europe, announce jointly a cooperative program to help improve the world economic situation, look seriously at the possibility of limiting armaments (including a possible loan to Germany to offset the financial difficulties limitation would bring), and finally, not to intervene in matters concerning the Greater Reich, which would include Danzig. There was only one precondition: Germany and Britain should sign a treaty of nonaggression, in which both sides would renounce unilateral aggressive action as a policy method. (Howarth)
1939 August 3 Jews in Memel are allowed to liquidate their property without Nazi interference.
1939 August 4 The Polish government sends an ultimatum to the Danzig Senate warning it will arm its customs officers if the Senate does not stop interfering with Polish customs inspectors. Supposedly based on mistaken information, Poland's action causes great consternation among the Nazis.
1939 August 5 Britain and France's joint military mission to Russia departs Britain for Leningrad on a slow-moving, passenger-cargo ship. Discussions have been arranged with Molotov in Moscow (See July 23). (Shirer I)
1939 August 5 Albert Foerster, Nazi Gauleiter of Danzig, flies to Berchtesgaden to confer with Hitler. Meanwhile, the customs dispute in Danzig is temporarily resolved, but is seen in other countries as a Nazi capitulation, infuriating Hitler.
1939 August 6 Mussolini, fearing Germany will go to war with Poland, discusses with Count Galeazzo Ciano, his son-in-law and Foreign Minister, possible ways to evade the terms of the Pact of Steel, which commits them to aiding Germany. Mussolini believes Italy is still 3 years short of readiness for war.
1939 August 6 German authorities in Danzig tell the Poles that their customs officials can no longer work in the port.
1939 August 7 Count Ciano requests a meeting with Joachim von Ribbentrop.
1939 August 8 Winston Churchill makes a fifteen-minute radio broadcast to America, warning of the increasingly serious threat of war in Europe and the likelihood of American involvement. "This is the time to fight - to speak - to attack!"
1939 August 9 Germany issues an official warning to the Polish government in Warsaw, saying that another comminatory note to Danzig will result in strained Polish-German relations, with Poland being responsible.
1939 August 9 German Ambassador von Dirksen, preparing to depart on leave to Germany, visits British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax. Halifax questions von Dirksen over the "sharp tone of the German press concerning Danzig." Dirksen replies that it is the fault of the Polish newspaper Czas which has published a statement that if there were any attempt to incorporate Danzig into the Reich, Polish troops would open fire on the Free City. (Howarth)
1939 August 9 The joint British-French military mission arrives in Leningrad.
1939 August 9 Jews from several Hagana units sink the British police boat Sinbad II in Palestine. (Edelheit)
1939 August 10 The Warsaw government warns Germany that "any future intervention to the detriment of Polish rights and interests in Danzig will be considered an act of aggression."
1939 August 10 In Berlin: Julius Schnurre, head of the Economic Policy Department of the German Foreign Ministry, picks up discussions with Georgi Astakhov, Charge d'Affaires of the Soviet Embassy, sounding out the possibility of a pact between Germany and the Soviet Union.
1939 August 10 Delegates of the joint British-French military mission spend the day sightseeing in Leningrad.
1939 August 10 Alfred Naujocks, a young SS secret-service veteran and member of the SD since its founding in 1934, is personally ordered by Reinhard Heydrich to fake a Polish attack on the radio station at Gleiwitz near the Polish border. "Practical proof is needed for these attacks by the Poles for the foreign press as well as German propaganda," Heydrich tells Naujocks. (Alfred Naujocks, sworn affidavit, Nuremberg, November 20, 1945; Shirer I)
1939 August 10 Night-time air war exercises are conducted over England on a larger scale than any time since WWI. 500 aircraft (bombers with fighter support) sweep in from the east to attack Birmingham, Rochester, Bedford, Brighton and Derby. 800 defenders take off to challenge the attackers. Defending forces are largely successful in beating off the attacking forces. Bombers approaching London have particular difficulty because of a balloon barrage above the capital.
1939 August 11 The British-French military mission finally arrives in Moscow. It is agreed to start talks the next day; by then it will be too late. Approaches are already quietly underway between Germany and Russia (See August 19). (Shirer I)
1939 August 11 The British Foreign Office learns that Germany will be in a state of complete military readiness on August 15.
1939 August 11 Karl Burckhardt, Commissioner of the League of Nations in Danzig, is summoned to see Hitler at Berchtesgaden.
1939 August 11 Italian Foreign Minister Ciano and Ribbentrop meet in Salzburg. When Ciano asks Ribbentrop whether Germany wants the "Polish Corridor" or Danzig, Ribbentrop replies, "Not that any more.We want war." (Howarth)
1939 August 11 Gauleiter Foerster warns his Danzig Nazis to be prepared for anything.
1939 August 11 Jews begin to be expelled from the Czech Protectorate.
1939 August 12 The British-French military mission begins talks in Moscow. They will continue until August 19, but no agreement will be reached because of a dispute over Soviet troops being allowed in Poland. (WWIIDBD)
1939 August 12 Ciano meets with Hitler at Berchtesgaden. Hitler is pondering over his maps planning the war against Poland. Hitler believes that the war will be localized and there is not the slightest danger that Britain and France would fight. When Ciano protests that so little would be gained at such vast risk, Hitler says to him "You are a southerner, and you will never understand how much I, as a German, need to get my hands on the timber of the Polish forests." Ciano notes: "He has decided to strike, and strike he will."
1939 August 13 Ciano returns to Rome disgusted at the attitudes of Ribbentrop and Hitler. "They have betrayed us and lied to us. Now they are dragging us into an adventure which we do not want and which may compromise the regime and the country as a whole." (Ciano)
1939 August 14 New York Congressman Hamilton Fish, president of the U.S. delegation to the Interparliamentary Union Congress conference in Oslo, Norway, meets with Ribbentrop. Fish is a vocal isolationist and staunch opponent of Roosevelt. The congressman advocates better relations with Germany and hopes to solve the Danzig question during the August 15-19 conference in Norway. Ribbentrop tells Fish that Germany has lost its patience and unless Danzig is restored to Germany war will break out. (Secrets)
1939 August 14 Chamberlain and Halifax receive details of Ciano's meetings with Hitler and Ribbentrop. They consider the idea of sending a German-speaking Briton to negotiate directly with Hitler.
1939 August 14 Hitler orders Ribbentrop to telegraph Ambassador von der Schulenberg in Moscow, ordering him to secure "a speedy clarification of German-Russian relations." Ribbentrop says that he is prepared to personally fly to Moscow and present Hitler's views to Stalin "because only through such a direct discussion can a change be brought about, and it should not be impossible therefore to lay the foundation for a final settlement of German-Russian relations."
1939 August 15 German State Secretary Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker warns Sir Neville Henderson, the British Ambassador in Berlin, that the situation is extremely serious. Weizsäcker says any German diplomatic initiative is unthinkable in view of Beck's speech declaring that Poland was prepared to talk, only if Germany would first accept Poland's terms. In view of that, the ultimatum to the Danzig Senate, and the comminatory note to Germany of August 10, no further talks are possible.
1939 August 15 Churchill begins a tour of the Maginot Line, France's main land defensive barrier against Germany.
1939 August 15 Molotov meets with von der Schulenberg in Moscow and expresses great interest in Hitler's proposals. Von der Schulenberg in turn is surprised and pleased at the Russian's moderate conditions.
1939 August 15 Captain Karl Doenitz, head of the U-boat arm of the German Navy, is recalled unexpectedly early from leave.
1939 August 15 Ambassador Von Dirksen's leave in Berlin is uninterrupted. Although he wishes to see Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister will not see him. Von Dirksen discovers that Italian Ambassador in Berlin, Bernardo Attolico, believes Hitler is about to go to war with Poland, ignoring Britain's conciliatory attitude. Von Dirksen is convinced Attolico is wrong. (See August 3)
1939 August 15 Advance mobilization orders are sent to the German railways, and plans are made to move Army headquarters to Zossen, east of Berlin. The navy reports that the pocket battleships Graf Spee and Deutschland and twenty-one submarines are ready to sail for their stations in the Atlantic. (Shirer I)
1939 August 15 The annual Nuremberg Party Rally, which Hitler proclaimed on April 1 as the "Party Rally of Peace" and which is scheduled to begin the first week in September, is secretly cancelled. (Shirer I)
1939 August 16 Ribbentrop cables von der Schulenberg, telling him that all Molotov's conditions can be met. Captain Doenitz arrives at Kiel, the main U-boat base, and begins to implement plans for Fall Weiss (Case White) the projected attack on Poland.
1939 August 16-26 The Twenty-first World Zionist Congress meets in Geneva. It strongly opposes the British White Paper and expresses concern for the fate of Jews in Germany, Poland and the rest of eastern Europe.
1939 August 17 The League of Nations' Permanent Mandate Commission rules that the British White Paper is inconsistent with provisions of the Mandate.
1939 August 17 General Halder makes a strange entry in his diary: "Canaris checked with Section I (Operations). Himmler, Heydrich, Obersalzberg: 150 Polish uniforms with accessories for Upper Silesia." (Shirer I) (See August 31, 8 PM)
1939 August 17 Molotov is highly gratified by the German's obvious haste to achieve a political agreement. Soviet Marshal Voroshilov - by now sure that neither the French nor the British mean business - dismisses their delegates for four days.
1939 August 17 Sumner Welles, U.S. Under Secretary of State, passes information concerning the German overtures to Moscow to British Ambassador Sir Ronald Lindsay, who immediately telegraphs London, confident his message will be in the Foreign Office first thing in the morning, London time. It is, but will not be deciphered for four days.
1939 August 18 Weizsäcker repeats his warning to the British and French Ambassadors. (See August 15)
1939 August 18 After learning a German attack on Poland is threatened to take place within two weeks, Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador in Berlin, implores Chamberlain to write personally to Hitler.
1939 August 18 Doenitz despatches Germany's 35 operational U-boats. 18 are sent to the eastern Atlantic and the remaining 17 to the Baltic for operations against Poland and possibly Russia.
1939 August 19 A German-Soviet economic agreement are completed and signed in Moscow. Molotov suddenly produces a draft of a Russian-German nonagression pact and invites Ribbentrop to Moscow on the 26th or 27th.
1939 August 19 Orders to sail are issued to the German Navy. The pocket battleship Graf Spee is ordered to waters off Brazil, and her sister ship, Deutschland, is directed to the North Atlantic. Twenty-one submarines are ordered to take up positions north and northwest of the British Isles. (Shirer I)
1939 August 19 At 7:10 PM, a telegram is received in Berlin from the German ambassador in Moscow: "SECRET. MOST URGENT. THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT AGREE TO THE REICH FOREIGN MINISTER COMING TO MOSCOW ON AUGUST 26 OR 27. MOLOTOV HANDED ME A DRAFT OF A NON-AGRESSION PACT." (Shirer I)
1939 August 19 Churchill and Chaim Weizmann meet in London. (Edelheit)
1939 August 20 In Moscow during the early hours of the morning an agreement in signed between Germany and the Soviet Union.
1939 August 20 Hitler, suspecting Molotov might cause delays in ratification of the nonagression pact, sends a personal message to Stalin asking him to receive Ribbentrop in Moscow as soon as possible, telling Stalin "The tension between Germany and Poland has become intolerable... A crisis may arise any day. Germany is at any rate determined from now on to look after the interests of the Reich with all the means at her disposal."
1939 August 20 The Soviet Union scores a major victory over Japan in the border conflict along the Outer Mongolia-Manchukuo frontier and Japan sues for peace. By the end of the campaign Soviet losses will be10,000 killed and wounded. Japanese losses: 52,000 to 55,000 killed and wounded.
1939 August 20 German U-boats take up positions in the North Atlantic shipping lanes.
1939 August 21 The Trade and Credit Agreement is signed between Germany and the Soviet Union. Stalin cables Hitler: "THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT HAVE INSTRUCTED ME TO INFORM YOU THAT THEY AGREE TO HERR VON RIBBENTROP'S ARRIVING IN MOSCOW ON AUGUST 23. -- J. STALIN."
1939 August 21 Neville Chamberlain arrives in London, having travelled overnight from Scotland. British Intelligence suggests that Field Marshal Hermann Goering should come to London for discussions.
1939 August 21 Soviet Marshal Voroshilov (knowing of Ribbentrop's impending arrival) indefinitely postpones any continuation of Anglo-French-Soviet talks.
1939 August 22 Chamberlain writes a letter to Hitler, warning him the German-Soviet Agreement will not alter Britain's obligation to come to the aid of Poland.
1939 August 22 Chamberlain gives a fighting speech, to be broadcast by the BBC, saying it is unthinkable that Great Britain should not carry out its obligations to Poland.
1939 August 22 Sir William Seeds, British Ambassador in Moscow, accuses Molotov of negotiating in bad faith.
1939 August 22 At Obersalzburg, Hitler tells his generals that the destruction of Poland "starts on Saturday morning" (26 August), the aim of this war is the wholesale destruction of Poland.
(Note: Hitler proclaims to the commanders of the armed services: "Our strength is in our quickness and our brutality. Genghis Khan had millions of women and children killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees him only as a great state builder... Thus for the time being I have sent to the East only my "Death's Head Units" with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?") (Architect)
1939 August 22-4 The Fulda Bishop's Conference of 1939 includes the bishops of Austria and the Sudetenland for the first time. All are aware of the "Top Secret" instructions of July 17. (Lewy)
1939 August 23 The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact is signed in Moscow. Sometimes called the Ribbentrop-Molotov Agreement of Non-Aggression, it sets up plans for a 10-year collaboration between Germany and Soviet Russia. Both parties agreed that if either became involved in a war, the other would give no help to the enemy; nor would either join any group against the other. There was no clause stating that withdrawal was allowed if one signatory attacked a third party, although this was customary in such treaties. A "secret protocol" to the agreement provided for the partition of Poland along the line of the rivers Pisa, Narew, Vistula and San in the event of what was referred to as a "territorial transition" taking place in Poland. The Soviet Union was allocated all the Byelorussian and Ukrainian provinces of Poland, as well as the province of Lublin and part of that of Warsaw. Germany was to take the western part of the country, though the possibility of retaining a small remnant of a Polish state was kept open. The USSR was to have a free hand in Finland, Estonia and Latvia; and Germany in Lithuania. Soviet interest in the Rumanian province of Bessarabia was recognised by Germany.)
1939 August 23 Hitler is delighted. He believes Stalin has just handed him the perfect opportunity to restore the Reich's "rightful possessions" without having to fight a war on two fronts. He is certain that this new treaty with the Russians will allow him to safely reclaim Danzig and take back the Polish Corridor. Britain and France, he tells his staff, without other major allies, will not go to war in such a situation... "especially over what everyone knows are, by all rights, German territories anyway." (Toland)
1939 August 23 Hitler sets the date for the invasion of Poland as: Saturday, August 26, at 4:30am. Colonel-General Alfred Jodl is appointed Chief of staff of the armed forces supreme command (OKW).
1939 August 23 Orders are issued to confiscate all radios belonging to German Jews. (Eyes)
1939 August 23 The British and French Special Military Mission leaves Moscow.
1939 August 23 French citizens are advised to leave Paris. Churchill leaves France and returns to London. Daladier asks the Permanent Committee for National Defence whether they can stand by and watch the disappearance of Poland and Rumania; they agree that they cannot.
1939 August 23 Sir Percy Lorain, British Ambassador to Rome, informs his government that he is confident the Italians will not fight. Mussolini declares himself ready to mediate.
1939 August 23 Hitler writes to Neville Chamberlain: "Germany was prepared to settle the questions of Danzig and of the Corridor by the method of negotiations on the basis of a truly unparalleled magnanimity, but the allegations put forth by England regarding a German mobilization against Poland, theassertion of aggressive designs toward Romania, Hungary, etc. as well as the so-called Guarantee Declarations which were subsequently given had dispelled any Polish inclination to negotiate on a basis which would have also been tolerable for Germany... The German Reich government has received information to the effect that the British government has the intention to carry out measures of mobilization which, according to the statements contained in your own letter, are clearly directed against Germany alone... I therefore inform your Excellency that in the event of these military announcements being carried into effect, I shall order the immediate mobilization of the German armed forces."
1939 August 23 Foreign Minister Beck agrees to allow passage of Soviet troops through Poland.
1939 August 23 Belgium proclaims its neutrality and mobilizes its army for defense.
1939 August 24 Poland and Great Britain formally sign a treaty of mutual assistance.
1939 August 24 The British Parliament reconvenes and passes the Emergency Powers Act. Royal Assent is given on the same day and the Royal Navy is ordered to war stations. Soon afterward a general mobilization begins.
1939 August 24 Hitler predicts the Chamberlain government will fail. Goering meets with Birger Dahlerus, a Swedish businessman and proposes that Dahlerus, who has good connections, should act as a go-between with Great Britain.
1939 August 24 President Roosevelt appeals for settlement of the Danzig crisis by mediation.
1939 August 24 Nazi Gauleiter Albert Foerster becomes head of state in Danzig.
1939 August 24 Pope Pius XII appeals for peace.
1939 August 25 Goering's friend, Swiss businessman Birger Dahlerus, lands in Croyden, England, in Goering's private plane. Dahlerus personally gives copies of Hitler's proposals for a peaceful settlement of the Danzig problem to Lord Halifax.
1939 August 25 Colonel Walery Slawek, a Polish opponent of the anti-German policies of Marshal Smigly-Rydz and President Moscicki, and a strong proponent of Marshal Pilsudski's pro-German policy, is murdered and his death ruled a suicide, even though two bullets are found in his body. (Sturdza)
1939 August 25 Hitler confers with British Ambassador Henderson, telling him that "Poland's provocations have become intolerable." Hitler then makes several new proposals to Britain, whose friendship, Hitler says, he has "always sought." In conclusion, Hitler strongly urges Henderson to leave for London that same day with these new proposals.
1939 August 25 Italian Ambassador Attolico tells Hitler that Italy will not support Germany without German help with arms. On hearing of this, Hitler cancels his invasion of Poland scheduled for 4:30 AM the following morning.
1939 August 25 The number of incidents along the Polish-German border increase. In Makeszowa, near Katowice, German soldiers take over the court house and railway station. Poles break into and wreck the offices of a German newspaper. More Polish reservists are called up and cars and horses are requisitioned.
1939 August 25 President Roosevelt once again appeals for peace.
1939 August 26 The British Chiefs of Staff advise the cabinet that the earliest possible date for any ultimatum to Germany is September 1.
1939 August 26 Dahlerus meets with Halifax again, flies back to Berlin with a letter for Goering and returns to London later that afternoon.
1939 August 26 French Ambassador Robert Coulondre sees Hitler and appeals to him as one soldier to another. When Coulondre cites the probable fate of women and children in any war, Hitler hesitates, but Ribbentrop quickly strengthens his resolve.
1939 August 26 The Polish government in Warsaw increases the pace of its military mobilization.
1939 August 26 Mussolini submits a list of Italian requirements to Ribbentrop.
1939 August 26 Palestinian Jews (IZL) assassinate two British police detectives accused on torturing suspects. Many Britons hate and fear the Jews as much as the Germans. (Edelheit)
1939 August 27 Italian Foreign Minister Ciano recommends British acceptance of Hitler's latest offer.
1939 August 27 The British Cabinet learns from Lord Halifax of "Mr D" (Birger Dahlerus) and his efforts on the Nazis behalf. Dahlerus arrives back in Berlin about midnight.
1939 August 27 Polish Foreign Minister Beck agrees to consider an exchange of population between predominantly German and predominantly Polish areas.
1939 August 28 Dahlerus has an early morning meeting with Goering and Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes, Counsellor of the British Embassy, before breakfasting again with Goering. Later that day rationing is imposed in Germany.
1939 August 28 Polish Foreign Minister Beck refuses to go to Berlin. Beck says he accepts the principle of direct negotiations, but towards midnight tells British Ambassador Kennard that Polish mobilisation is proceeding.
1939 August 28 Karl Maria Weisthor (Wiligut) officially retires from the SS. Himmler requests the return of Weisthor's SS Totenkopfring, (Deathshead ring), SS dagger, and sword. Himmler personally keeps them under lock and key. (Weisthor file, Berlin Document Center; Roots)
1939 August 28 Ambassador Henderson returns to Berlin from London. Chamberlain requests information concerning Hitler's intentions towards Poland.
1939 August 28 Slovak Premier Josef Tiso invites the Germany army to occupy Slovakia. (Edelheit)
1939 August 28 The Netherland (Holland) orders a general military mobilization.
1939 August 29 At 7.00 AM Dahlerus telephones Cadogan with news of his meeting with Goering. The Fuehrer "was in fact only considering how reasonable he could be," he said, and was about to extend an invitation to the Poles for discussions in Berlin.
1939 August 29 Chamberlain makes a firm uncompromising speech in the House of Commons, saying "The catastrophe is not yet upon us, but I cannot say that the danger of it has in any way receded." He warns the press to exercise restraint, and apologizes for not being able to give more than an outline of his communications with Hitler.
1939 August 29 Hitler meets with Henderson, repeats his friendly sentiments towards the British Empire and grudgingly accepts direct negotiations with Poland, but demands that a Polish plenipotentiary must arrive in Berlin by the end of the following day. Henderson tells Hitler that the short term of 36 hours sounds like an ultimatum. Hitler replies that this is not an ultimatum, but has the purpose of stressing the urgency of a situation where two completely mobilized armies are confronting one another. On the Western border, only five German divisions man the Siegfried Line in front of the entire French Army.
1939 August 29 German troops enter Slovakia on Poland's southern frontier, but Ambassadors Kennard and Nokl persuade Beck to postpone any further Polish mobilization.
1939 August 29 Ernst von Weizsäcker, State Secretary in the Foreign Ministry learns of a secret annex to the 1933 Concordat with the Vatican. It stipulates that in the event Germany introduces universal military training, students studying for the priesthood are declared exempt except in the case of general mobilization. In that event most of the diocesan clergy are to be exempt from reporting for service, while all others are to be inducted for pastoral work with the troops or into the medical corps. (Lewy)
1939 August 29 Switzerland orders full mobilization of its frontier forces.
1939 August 30 The Warsaw government orders the Polish army to fully mobilize. Drastic measures are taken to stop any possible sabotage by pro-Germans. (Edelheit)
1939 August 30 Ambassador Henderson is advised by the Home Office that Hitler's demand for the arrival of a Polish plenipotentiary that day is unreasonable. Henderson and Ribbentrop meet again, and this time come close to blows. Ribbentrop goes over Hitler's latest proposals, but Henderson claims Ribbentrop refuses to give him a copy of the text.
1939 August 30 Hitler agrees to Britain's request for a 24-hour extension to permit a Polish negotiator to meet with von Ribbentrop.
1939 August 30 Beck tells Ambassador Kennard that Polish mobilization will resume at midnight. By 4.30 PM. all Polish towns are covered with posters summoning all men up to the age of 40 to report for enlistment. (Howarth)
1939 August 30 The British Foreign Office sends a message at 5:30 PM to Berlin after it receives reports of German sabotage in Poland. It says in part, "Germany must exercise complete restraint if Poland is to do so as well."
1939 August 31 The sixth decree on implementation of the law on sterilization virtually puts an end to sterilizations in Germany. (Science)
1939 August 31 Henderson, instead of informing the Poles of Hitler's proposals and the granting of an extension, tries to dissuades Lipski from meeting with von Ribbentrop at all. Henderson, in his Final Report, writes "I suggested that he (Lipski) recommend to his government an interview between Marshal Smigly-Rydz and Goering. I felt obliged to add that I could not conceive of the success of any negotiations if they were conducted by Ribbentrop." (Sturdza)
1939 August 31 A telegram from Sir Howard Kennard, British Ambassador in Warsaw to Lord Halifax states that Polish Foreign Minister Beck has informed him that Lipski has been forbidden to receive any documents from von Ribbentrop.
1939 August 31 Lipski telegrams Beck that French Ambassador Coulondre has told him that Henderson has been informed of Germany's intention to wait until midnight August 31st. Lipski writes: "Coulondre advises me to inform the German government, only after midnight, that the Polish Embassy was always at its reach." (Sturdza)
1939 August 31 The Supreme Soviet ratifies the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact.
1939 August 31 At half past noon, Hitler issues Directive # 1 for the conduct of the war: (1) Now that all the political possibilities of disposing by peaceful means of a situation which is intolerable for Germany are exhausted, I have determined on a solution by force. (2) The attack on Poland is to be carried out. Date of attack: September 1, 1939. Time of attack: 4:45am. (Shirer I)
1939 August 31 Polish Ambassador Lipski meets with Ribbentrop at 6:15 PM.
1939 August 31 A telegram to Beck from Lipski informs the Foreign Minister that "I have met with von Ribbentrop. I have obeyed instructions received and told him that I was not empowered to negotiate. Mr. von Ribbentrop repeated that he believed I had such powers. He told me that he would report my visit to the Chancellor."
1939 August 31 SS Sturmbannfuehrer Alfred Helmut Naujocks is said to have received the code words "Grandmama dead," thus ending a 14 day wait at the German radio station at Gleiwitz, where he and Gestapo head Heinrich Mueller are to carry out a mock attack. The "canned goods:" a dozen "condemned criminals" dressed in Polish military uniforms are believed to have been given fatal injections before being shot.
(Note: See Alfred Naujocks, sworn affidavit, Nuremberg, November 20, 1945. Shortly after signing his affidavit, Naujocks mysteriously disappeared from custody. Some Germans and numerous antisemites believe he had been forced to sign his confession and was murdered to keep him silent.)
1939 August 31 At 8 PM the German radio station at Gleiwitz near the Polish border announces it is under attack. Most contemporary historians believe Hitler staged this attack as an excuse to invade Poland. Holocaust deniers and historical revisionists, however, suggest that British or Jewish secret agents were responsible. (See August 10,15, 17, 1939)
1939 August 31 At 8.20 PM Ciano is informed by the telephone central office that London has cut its communications with Italy. (Howarth)
1939 August 31 At 9 PM all radio stations in Germany interrupt their schedules to broadcast Hitler's 16 point plan for Poland. It includes provisions for: the annexation of Danzig by Germany; a corridor across the Danzig Corridor; a plebiscite to be held in the Corridor area in 12 months time, and a later exchange of populations. The port of Gdynia is to be recognized as Polish, thus leaving Poland with access to the sea. It will not be delivered to the Polish ambassador until September 1. (Howarth; Bell)
1939 August 31 A huge banquet is held in Ribbentrop's honor at the Kremlin in Moscow. Ribbentrop, Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan and Beria are all seated at the head table. The party ends at 3:00 AM.

SHALL I CONTINUE? This after all only goes up through August.

http://www.humanitas-international.org/showcase/chronography/timebase/1939tbse.htm

[Colorado Blue]

65. The rest of 1939 (I wouldn't want to leave anything out.)

1939 September 1 4:45 AM, German troops cross the Polish frontier. The German military machine strikes in what is known as a Blitzkrieg (lightning war). High-speed panzer (tank) units blast holes in the Polish lines. Luftwaffe (air force) bombers destroy the Polish air force on the ground, damage communications lines, and prevent the Poles from moving reinforcements, supplies, and ammunition to the front, while German motorized units and footsoldiers quickly move forward to capture and hold the conquered ground. In all, 53 German divisions take part in the attack.

1939 September 1 An 8 PM curfew is established for all German Jews.

1939 September 1 Mussolini proposes a suspension of hostilities and the immediate convening of a Conference of the Big Powers, Poland included, to discuss terms for a peaceful settlement. Germany, France and Poland immediately accept Mussolini's proposals. Britain categorically rejects any negotiations and demands withdrawal of German troops from all occupied Polish territory (30 kilometers deep). Britain does not consult with Warsaw before making its decision.
1939 September 1 Osborne, British Ambassador at the Vatican, reports to Lord Halifax that he had suggested to Papal Secretary of State Luigi Maglione that publication of the last-minute unsuccessful peace appeal of Pope Pius XII be accompanied by an expression of regret that the German government, despite the Papal appeal, has plunged the world into war. Maglione, he says, has turned down this request as too specific an intervention into international politics. (Lewy)

1939 September 1 The Euthanasia Decree, which will not actually be written until October, is predated to go into effect on this date in Greater Germany. This decree orders that all Germans with incurable diseases are to be killed in order to free up needed hospital space and eliminate "useless eaters."
1939 September 1 Gauleiter Albrecht Foerster proclaims an anschluss (union) of Danzig with Greater Germany.

1939 September 2 Coulondre telegrams Daladier: "Stay firm, Hitler will knuckle under." France revokes its acceptance of Mussolini's peace proposals.
1939 September 2 German control is established in Danzig and a concentration camp is opened outside the city at Stutthof. Hundreds of Jews are among the first prisoners.

1939 September 2 The Gestapo orders all Jews in Germany between 16 and 55 years of age to report for compulsory labor. (Edelheit)

1939 September 3 Great Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand declare war on Germany. The British ultimatum that Germany withdraw from Poland was delivered to the German Foreign Ministry at 9 AM by Ambassador Neville Henderson. It gave Hitler two hours to begin the withdrawal or a state of war would exists between the two nations. At 11 AM the French ultimatum was delivered. It expires at 5 PM.
1939 September 3 Ten British bombers drop 13 tons of leaflets on the Ruhr. Printed on the six million sheets of paper is the message: "Your rulers have condemned you to the massacres, miseries and privations of a war they cannot ever hope to win." (Duffy)
1939 September 3 Unity Mitford shoots herself in the head with a small pistol outside a German government building in Munich. Her attempt is unsuccessful, but she will continue to live for several years after the war as an invalid.
1939 September 3 Lieutenant Colonel Nikolaus von Vormann, army liaison officer to Hitler, records in his notes of the day: "Even today the Fuehrer still believes that the Western powers are only going to stage a phony war, so to speak." (Irving I)
1939 September 3 A German U-boat is accused of sinking the Athenia, a Canadian liner bound for Montreal. The sinking results in the loss of 112 lives, including 28 Americans. During the first two months of the war, 67 British merchant ships are sunk. (See October 5)
1939 September 3 Himmler tells the Einsatzgruppe under Udo von Woyrsch that its mission is to suppress the Polish resistence movement with all available means. The overall operation of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland has been given the code-name Aktion Tannenberg. It will officially come to an end on October 25. (Architect)
(Note: It is uncertain whether this code-name referred to the Battle of Tannenberg (1914) or to the well-known Pan-German writer Otto Richard Tannenberg. (See Tannenberg, 1911)
1939 September 4 With Hitler's consent, Goering makes a speech asking for a settlement with Poland.
1939 September 4 Hitler visits Marshal Pilsudski's grave in the Krakow Cathedral. (Sturdza)
1939 September 4 British Blenheim and Wellington bombers attack the German naval facilities at Wilhelmshaven. Of the 29 bombers that took off from England, 5 failed to find the target and 7 were shot down. The only serious damage was done by a Blenheim that managed to crash into the bow of the cruiser Emden, killing a number of sailors. (Duffy)
1939 September 5 The United States proclaims neutrality in the European war.
1939 September 6 The German command asks the Polish Command to evacuate noncombatants from Warsaw if it intends to defend the city. Poland answers: "Warsaw will be defended, nobody will be evacuated." (Sturdza)
1939 September 7 Heydrich tells his division heads that the Polish leadership must be "neutalized." The Einsatzgruppen already had lists of people considered to be hostile to Germany, which included members of Polish patriotic organizations, communists, clergymen, noblemen, and Jews. (Architect)
1939 September 7-9 French forces cross the German border at three different locations: near Saarbrücken, Saarlouis, and Zweibrücken. The French meet little resistence due to the fact that Hitler had ordered German units near the border not to engage the French units unless they were attacked and forced to return fire. The transfer of troops to Poland had left only eleven regular divisions plus the equivalent of one division of fortress troops defending the western frontier. These were supported by 35 recently-formed divisions of second-, third-, and fouth-line troops. There were no armored or motorized units facing west; they had all been tranferred to the east. (Duffy)
1939 September 9 Hitler issues an amnesty for Catholic priests accused of minor infractions of German law (See March 11, 1940). (Lewy)
1939 September 9 All Jewish men in the small Ruhr town of Gelsenkirchen are deported to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, near Berlin. The women and children are left to fend for themselves. (Atlas)
1939 September 12 Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, protests to General Keitel that extensive shootings are planned in Poland, and that the nobility and intelligentsia are to be exterminated. The world, Canaris said, would hold the armed forces responsible. (Architect)
1939 September 12 The French army now occupies a 15-mile-wide front some five miles inside German territory. Although his forces have met no real opposition to its advance, General Maurice Gamelin halts his army and issues orders to prepare for a rapid retreat at the first sign of strong German opposition. (Duffy)
Note: General Gamelin brazenly lies to the beleaguered Poles when they protest the lack of French action; telling them that half of his active divisions are engaged in combat and meeting vigorous German resistence. "I have thus gone beyond my promise to take the offensive with the bulk of my forces by the fifteenth day after mobilization. It has been impossible for me to do more." Only 9 of France's 85 divisions on the frontier were employeed in the "offensive." (Shirer II)
1939 September 17 Stalin's Soviet Army invades Poland from the East.Neither England nor France chooses to break diplomatic relations with Moscow or declare war, despite Russia's obvious aggression.
Note: Churchill tried to look on the bright side, saying he saw an advantage in that it would require 25 German divisions to watch the Russians on the eastern front and he was certain that war in the Balkans would eventually result. In an early broadcast he told his listeners that "I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest."
1939 September 17 Charles Lindbergh makes his first anti-intervention speech on U.S. radio, arguing that Stalin is as much to be feared as Hitler. (Bookshelf)
1939 September 18 The Polish government and High Command escape into exile in France.
1939 September 21 Reinhard Heydrich tells a meeting of his department heads in the Reich Central Security Office (RSHA), an organization emcompassing the Gestapo, SS, SD, and Criminal Police, that the mass deportations of thousands of Jews, including Poles, Germans, Austrians, Czechs and Slovaks, to the eastern areas of Poland are the "first steps in the final solution" (die Endlösung).(Apparatus)
1939 September 21 Romanian Legionaries murder Armand Calinescu, who they blame for the death of Corneliu Codreanu. Nine of the assassins turn themselves in to police and all are quickly executed.

1939 September 21 The Germans decree that all Polish communities with less than 500 Jews are to be dissolved and that the Jews are hereafter to live in certain restricted areas in the larger cities, or in a special region between Lublin and Nisko, called the "Lublinland reservation." (Atlas)
1939 September 21 Cardinal August Hlond, Primate of Poland, arrives in Rome and personally reports of German atrocities against Catholic priests in Poland to the Pope. The Vatican radio and "L'Osservatore Romano" tell the story to the world. (Lewy)
1939 September 22 Four hundred Legionaries are murdered in Romania by government dead squads and their bodies left at the country's crossroads as a warning to others.

1939 September 23 All German Jews are ordered to turn in their radios to the local police. (Persecution

1939 September 23 Sigmund Freud dies at age eighty-three.

1939 September 24 Throughout the Jewish Day of Atonement, Jewish prisoners-of-war are forced to clean the latrines with their bare hands and are treated with particular brutality. (Atlas)

1939 September 24 The Luftwaffe firebombs Warsaw. (Edelheit)

1939 September 24 Synagogues throuhout Poland are burned down by Brenn-kommandos, German arson squads. The Germans accuse Jews of setting the fires and impose huge fines on the Jewish communities. (Edelheit)

1939 September 26 German local commanders in the vicinity of the German-Soviet line of demarcation issue a second order for Jews to leave their villages and cross over to the Russian side of the River San. Thousands of Jews are uprooted, robbed, and locked out of their homes and apartments. Hundreds are killed in the process. (Edelheit)
1939 September 27 The RSHA begins operation. Eventually it will become responsible for carryiing out the Endloesung der Judenfrage (final solution of the Jewish Question).

1939 September 27 Warsaw surrenders to the Germans after undergoing 36 hours of Luftwaffe bombing, strafings and artillery fire. Thousands of civilians are killed including an estimated 3,000 Jews.

1939 September 27 "Pray examine and advise upon a proposal to establish a minefiield, blocking Norwegian territorial waters at some lonely spot on the coast as far north as convenient. If the Norwegians will do this themselves, well and good. Otherwise a plan must be made for us to do it." (British First Lord to First Sea Lord and others, 27 September 1939)
1939 September 27 The Bulgarian government moves to suppress growing antisemitic violence.
1939 September 28 The Polish army surrenders. Approximately 750,000 Poles have been taken prisoner-of-war by the Germans and the Soviets.
1939 September 28 The German-Soviet Friendship Treaty is signed in order to regulate the Polish borders. Poland is in effect partitioned between Germany and the Soviet Union. Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz forms a Polish government-in-exile in France. During the fighting about 60,000 Polish soldiers have been killed, of whom some 6,000 were Jews.
1939 September 28 Lithuania annexes the Vilna region of Poland.
1939 September 28 Polish Cardinal August Hlond is allowed to broadcast a message to the Poles of the world over the Vatican Radio. The Pope, unhappy with the cardinal's presence in Rome, wants him to return to Poland, but the Germans will not allow it. (Lewy)
1939 September 28 General Wladyslaw Sikorski is named to command the new Polish army forming in France.
1939 September 28 An estimated 10,000 Polish Jews from Jaroslav (P) are driven across the River San into Soviet occupied Poland. (Edelheit)
NOTE: Pro-Germans and Holocaust deniers claim that (all along the borders) far more Jews escaped to the Soviet zone and later disappeared into the vast expanses of Russia, Siberia and the far east. This, they say, accounts for the large number of Polish Jews unaccounted for after the war, and who now are believed to have been killed in the death camps. This has never been proven.
1939 September 29 Germany and the Soviet Union officially partition Poland per their previous agreements.
1939 September 29 Food rationing is strongly enforced in Czechoslovakia.
1939 September 29 Nazi officials initiate the euthanasia program in occupied Poland. Thousands of mental patients, the chronically ill and the feeble are murdered by "medical teams."
1939 September 30 German Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs Hanns Kerrl sends word to all church authorities suggesting that all church bells should ring during the noon hour for seven days "out of grateful commemoration of the victory (over Poland) and of the dead."

That was just September, 1939.

Do we get the idea?

[Colorado Blue]

69. In view of the actions of the REAL Nazis, I submit that the

author of the original post is completely lacking in historical perspective.

If this is what passes for philosophy these days we are doomed. And if people have grown up without any sense whatsoever about the crisis faced by Churchill, by the people of Europe and especially by the Jews, then we are doubly doomed.

We cannot discuss ANYTHING to do with contemporary times unless we understand the past. It's pretty obvious that some of us don't get it, not even a little bit.

***

The history of Europe intermeshes with the history of Mandate Palestine. Everything that happened there must be seen in this larger perspective, as well as in the broader perspective of the Middle East.

Just in the past few days, we've seen horrific events, terrible sectarian violence, unfold in Iraq. One nationstate has threatened to eliminate another, and to retaliate against its nuclear reactor and refineries should a THIRD state, attack it in any attempt to control nuclear proliferation.

Time has now telescoped. We will see what happens next. But we are not dealing with matters that can be controlled by pointing fingers at websites or complaining because this or that website is "Zionist" or this or that author is "right wing," any more than hemming and hawing and appeasement could control Hitler in the thirties.

The sweep of history and the forces that were unleased, and which swirl again anew, are too vast and inexorable for petty bitching about little matters.

[Violet_Crumble]

71. In view of the fact that the authors granny died in the Holocaust...

The comment in yr post attacking him as somehow being ignorant of the Holocaust, even though he stated clearly that his grandmother had died in the Holocaust and he was very aware of what had happened, was perhaps one of the most insensitive comments I have had the misfortune to read while I've been at DU. This is a very good example of the Holocaust being abused by 'supporters' of Israel to attack anyone who doesn't support EVERYTHING Israel does. CB, just because someone doesn't agree with yr interpretation of history (I'm specifically talking about these strange versions of Israeli history where Israel is totally innocent and everyone else are the bad guys) that doesn't make them ignorant of history...

Violet...

[Englander]

56. It's from Gilbert's biography of Churchill.

I found the source, Peters takes it from;

"Martin Gilbert, Churchill, vol. 5, p. 1072.".

The relevant extract from Peters book, again at the Zionist site, this time with
sourced footnotes;

">snip

From the years from 1890 to 1945 about 500,000 Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi and Eastern Palestine Arabs settled into West Palestine, later in 1939 Winston Churchill said "So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population." 14

>snip

14. Martin Gilbert, Churchill, vol. 5, p. 1072.

>snip

This page was produced by Joseph E. Katz
Middle Eastern Political and Religious History Analyst
Brooklyn, New York

Source: "From Time Immemorial" by Joan Peters, 1984
SPECIAL OFFER Purchase this national bestseller available at WorldNetDaily

http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/return.html#14

____________________________


Review of Peters book, by the uber-bigot Daniel Pipes, again, miraculously, with
the exact same Churchill quote;

'From Time Immemorial
The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine
by Joan Peters

Harper and Row, 601 pp., $12.95 (paper)

Commentary
July 1984

Reviewed by Daniel Pipes

Joan Peters began this book planning to write About the Arabs who fled Palestine in 1948-49, when armies of the Arab states attempted to destroy the fledgling state of Israel. In the course of research on this subject, she came across a "seemingly casual" discrepancy between the standard definition of a refugee and the definition used for the Palestinian Arabs. In other cases, a refugee is someone forced to leave a permanent or habitual home. In this case, however, it is someone who had lived in Palestine for just two years before the flight that began in 1948.

This discrepancy made little impression on her at first, Miss Peters recounts. But as she continued, the anomaly of the Palestinians "began to nag and unravel" the outline of her book. Why a separate definition for the Palestinians? What was it about them that had to be incorporated in the official description of eligibility for refugee status? Reading historical materials about Palestine in the years before 1948, Miss Peters came across a statement by Winston Churchill that she says opened her eyes to the situation in Palestine. In 1939 Churchill challenged the common notion that Jewish immigration into Palestine had uprooted its Arab residents. To the contrary, according to him, "So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population."

Arabs crowded into Palestine? As Miss Peters pursued this angle she found a fund of obscure information that confirmed Churchill's observation. Drawing on census statistics and a great number of contemporary accounts, she pieced together the dimensions of Arab immigration into Palestine before 1948. Although others have noted this phenomenon, she is the first to document it, to attempt to quantify it, and to draw conclusions from it. Her historical detective work has produced startling results, which should materially influence the future course of the debate about the Palestinian problem.

Before entering into the statistics and reports Miss Peters uses to put forward her argument, however, I should enter a word of caution about From Time Immemorial. The author is not a historian or someone practiced in writing on politics, and she tends to let her passions carry her away. As a result, the book suffers from chaotic presentation and an excess of partisanship, faults which seriously mar its impact. But they do not diminish the importance of the facts presented. Despite its drawbacks. From Time Immemorial contains a wealth of information, which is well worth the effort to uncover.

http://www.danielpipes.org/article/1110

[Colorado Blue]

57. Why are you dragging Peters and Pipes into this discussion?

Do I mention them?

No.

[Englander]

61. Do you quote them?

Yes.

[Behind the Aegis]

62. No. She quoted Churchill!

Did that escape you?

[Coastie for Truth]

68. It's the old "Look, Look Over Here" Trick

favoured by followers and/or defenders of Sir Robert Sykes, OBE, VC, and Ernest Bevin.

[Violet_Crumble]

74. No, it's not...

And for obvious reasons which are clear to anyone reading the subthread...

Violet...

[Colorado Blue]

36. What you say is true but the problem goes way beyond what

you mention.

I was doing some research on the David Irving thing yesterday and ran across some websites that are unbelievable - they're promoting the Protocols (and worse) and other complete fabrications as fact - this one was called radioislam and it's located in Sweden. It's bad enough that rampant antisemitism is preached and illustrated and performed and taught in the M.E. but via the 'net it's becoming a global phenomenon.

All of this is tying back into an increasing spiral of bigotry that's really beginning to scare me. And when people like the author of the original post wrap their own bias in Christian concern for our well-being, it's doubly bad - because it SOUNDS reasonable, it's practically dripping with "love".

But it isn't love and it isn't reasonable.

[Violet_Crumble]

34. Polemics beats histrionics any day for me...

Seeing as how this guy spent the first chunk of the article talking about the long history of anti-Semitism, and seeing how he lost his grandmother in the Holocaust and was taunted at school for being a Jew, it looks pretty much like he's got his head around the 'original problem' you speak of. Wiggling out from the truth? Why isn't it possible for someone to be very aware of the history of anti-Semitism, yet think what he said was pretty spot-on?

All I can say is that what he said about people who are opposed to Israels policies towards the Palestinians being shouted down as anti-Semites, etc, has been borne out by some of the posts in this thread...

I didn't realise that the numbers of Jews are tragically small and constantly threatened. The only way I can see that numbers would be threatened is when people dismiss someone who identifies as being Jewish and who would be recognised as Jewish by the Reform movement as not being a Jew based on nothing more than the fact he wrote something they didn't like :)

On a more serious note, the main threat to the number of Jews would obviously be intermarriage and how difficult it is to convert to Judaism, though making conversion difficult is in a way a good thing as it's sorting the wheat from the chaff and making sure only people who sincerely want to convert do so....

Violet...

[Colorado Blue]

21. Must reading:

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/21832.html

For those who continue to believe that the situation in the Middle East is really all the fault of The Usual Suspect, or that Israeli policies are a root cause of antisemitism:

"An interesting difference in hostile stereotypes can be found in anecdotes, jokes, and the like. The main negative quality attributed to Jews in Turkish and Arab folklore was that they were cowardly and unmilitary—very contemptible qualities in a martial society. A late Ottoman joke may serve to illustrate this. The story is that in 1912, at the time of the Balkan war, when there was an acute threat to the Ottoman Empire in its final stages, the Jews, full of patriotic ardor, decided that they, too, wanted to serve in the defense of their country, so they asked permission to form a special volunteer brigade. Permission was given, and officers and ncos were sent to train and equip them. Once the Jewish volunteer brigade was armed, equipped, and trained, ready to leave for the front, they sent a message asking if they could have a police escort, because there were reports of bandits on the road.

This is a very interesting human document. Is it hostile? Not really. It shows a sort of amused tolerance, at once good-humored and contemptuous, that may help us to understand the bewilderment and horror at the Israeli victories in 1948 and after. We have some vivid descriptions at the time of the expectations and reactions of 1948. Azzam Pasha, who was then the secretary-general of the Arab League, is quoted as having said: “This will be like the Mongol invasions. We will utterly destroy them. We will sweep them into the sea.” The expectation was that it would be quick and easy. There would be no problem at all dealing with half a million Jews. It was then an appalling shock when five Arab armies were defeated by half a million Jews with very limited weaponry. It remains shameful, humiliating. This was mentioned at the time and has been ever since. One writer said: “It was bad enough to be conquered and occupied by the mighty empires of the West, the British Empire, the French Empire, but to suffer this fate at the hands of a few hundred thousand Jews was intolerable.”

Preceding the War of 1948, was a long romance between the Husseinis and Berlin, and the gradual introduction into the region of Nazi ideology:

"The Western form of anti-Semitism—the cosmic, satanic version of Jew hatred—provided solace to wounded feelings. It came to the Middle East in several stages. The first stage was almost entirely Christian, brought by European missionaries and diplomats. Its impact was principally on the local Christian minorities, where we find occasional recurrences of the previously little known blood libel. In the 15th and 16th centuries this had indeed been explicitly rejected in orders issued by Ottoman sultans. It was now revived on a massive scale.The first major case was the Damascus blood libel in 1840. This kind of anti-Semitism continued to grow, at first on a small scale, during the 19th and early 20th centuries, with a limited response. At the time of the Dreyfus Affair in France, Muslim opinion was divided, some against Dreyfus, some supporting him. A prominent Muslim thinker of the time, the Egyptian Rashid Rida, wrote defending Dreyfus and attacking his persecutors, accusing them not of fanaticism, since they had no real religious beliefs, but of prejudice and envy. Despite this response, one consequence of the affair was the first translation into Arabic of a batch of European anti-Semitic writings.

Then came the Third Reich, with connections to the Arab world and, later, to other Muslim countries. Now that the German archives are open, we know that within weeks of Hitler’s coming to power in 1933, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem got in touch with the German consul general in Jerusalem, Doctor Heinrich Wolff, and offered his services. It is interesting that the common image of the Germans pursuing the Arabs is the reverse of what happened. The Arabs were pursuing the Germans, and the Germans were very reluctant to get involved. Dr. Wolff recommended, and his government agreed, that as long as there was any hope of making a deal with the British Empire and establishing a kind of Aryan-Nordic axis in the West, it would be pointless to antagonize the British by supporting the Arabs.

But then things gradually changed, particularly after the Munich Conference in 1938. That was the turning point, when the German government finally decided that there was no deal to be made with Britain, no Aryan axis. Then the Germans turned their attention more seriously to the Arabs, responding at last to their approaches, and from then on the relationship developed very swiftly.

In 1940 the French surrender gave the Nazis new opportunities for action in the Arab world. In Vichy-controlled Syria they were able for a while to establish an intelligence and propaganda base in the heart of the Arab East. From Syria they extended their activities to Iraq, where they helped to establish a pro-Nazi regime headed by Rashid Ali al-Gailani. This was overthrown by the British, and Rashid Ali went to join his friend the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in Berlin, where he remained as Hitler’s guest until the end of the war. In the last days of Rashid Ali’s regime, on the first and second of June 1941, soldiers and civilians launched murderous attacks on the ancient Jewish community in Baghdad. This was followed by a series of such attacks in other Arab cities, both in the Middle East and in North Africa."

When people speak of the the war of 1948, and the consequences thereof, it is imperative that this be put into the perspective of the times.

[Colorado Blue]

22. "Stern reproof from an attitude of moral superiority"

"In anti-Semitism’s first stage, when the hostility was based in religion and expressed in religious terms, the Jew always had the option of changing sides. During the medieval and early modern periods, Jews persecuted by Christians could convert. Not only could they escape the persecution; they could join the persecutors if they so wished, and some indeed rose to high rank in the church and in the Inquisition. Racial anti-Semitism removed that option. The present-day ideological anti-Semitism has restored it, and now as in the Middle Ages, there seem to be some who are willing to avail themselves of this option.

For non-Jews the rationale brought a different kind of relief. For more than half a century, any discussion of Jews and their problems has been overshadowed by the grim memories of the crimes of the Nazis and of the complicity, acquiescence, or indifference of so many others. But inevitably, the memory of those days is fading, and now Israel and its problems afford an opportunity to relinquish the unfamiliar and uncomfortable posture of guilt and contrition and to resume the more familiar and more comfortable position of stern reproof from an attitude of moral superiority. It is not surprising that this opportunity is widely welcomed and utilized.

The new anti-Semitism has little or no bearing on the rights and wrongs of the Palestine conflict, but it must surely have some effect on perceptions of the problem, and therefore on the behavior and perhaps even on the policies of both participants and outsiders. Nor is the offense all on one side. One might argue that when Arabs are judged by a lower standard than Jews, as for example the minimal attention given to the atrocious crimes committed at Darfur, this is more offensive to Arabs than to Jews. Contempt is indeed more demeaning than hatred. But it is less dangerous."

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/21832.html

[eyl]

33. It's a bit disingenous

for him to, on one hand, dismiss the use of the Holocaust as an argument used on Israel's behalf, while using it to establish his own moral authority.

I began with the recognition that the cancer of anti-semitism has not been cured. Tragically, Israel's policies feed it - and when world Jewry defends Israeli policies right or wrong, then anger turns not only against Israel, but against all Jews. I wish it were mere rhetoric to say that Israeli politics today make a holocaust the day after tomorrow credible. If the whole Muslim world hates Israel, that is no idle speculation. To count on Arab disunity and Muslim sectarian conflict and a permanent American shield is no recipe for long-term security

I'm sorry, but this is stupid. By implication, he's arguing (even if he doesn't mean to) that anti-Semetism is justified, at least to some extent. After all, if it isn't, than Israel's actions are irrelevant to the question. (BTW, here's another use of the Holocaust).

There are Israelis who know all that, and there are Jews around the world who know it. In Britain, Jews for Justice for Palestinians organises to give Jewishness a human face. Tell them they are anti-semites and they will laugh bitterly, for the charge hurts deeply and is a lie. Prophets such as Uri Avnery give all this eloquent expression, but are heard by only a few. The media are afraid of a lobby that is quite prepared to do them serious damage.

Avneri a prophet? :rofl:

[Name removed]

53. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Spinoza]

54. Sickening.

A tortured effort to justify blaming a refugee nation , with accusatory language no other country on earth seems to engender, by--over and over--emphasizing a commonality of blood and kinship. As if, even if true, that would make any difference.

Am Yisrael Hai. ("The People of Israel Lives" a battle cry from the 2nd century A.D. Bar Kochba rebellion against Rome.)

[Colorado Blue]

59. May my right hand forget its cunning, if I forget thee

JERUSALEM OF GOLD
by Naomi Shemer


The mountain air is clear as wine
And the scent of pines
Is carried on the breeze of twilight
With the sound of bells.

And in the slumber of tree and stone
Captured in her dream
The city that sits solitary
And in its midst is a wall.

Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze, and of light
Behold I am a violin for all your songs.

How the cisterns have dried
The market-place is empty
And no one frequents the Temple Mount
In the Old City.

And in the caves in the mountain
Winds are howling
And no one descends to the Dead Sea
By way of Jericho.

Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze, and of light
Behold I am a violin for all your songs.

But as I come to sing to you today,
And to adorn crowns to you (i.e. to tell your praise)
I am the smallest of the youngest of your children (i.e. the least worthy of doing so)
And of the last poet (i.e. of all the poets born).

For your name scorches the lips
Like the kiss of a seraph
If I forget thee, Jerusalem,
Which is all gold...

Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze, and of light
Behold I am a violin for all your songs.

We have returned to the cisterns
To the market and to the market-place
A ram's horn (shofar) calls out (i.e. is being heard) on the Temple Mount
In the Old City.

And in the caves in the mountain
Thousands of suns shine -
We will once again descend to the Dead Sea
By way of Jericho!

Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze and of light
Behold I am a violin for all your songs.

(A translation by Chaya Galai
is posted on the official site
of the Israel Ministry
of Foreign Affairs.

http://www.jerusalemofgold.co.il/)

[Violet_Crumble]

73. So you think Israel is above criticism??

Because that's very much what seems to be making you sick. From yr response, it seems like you've read responses of some in this thread who seemed intent on claiming the author was taking a stance he hadn't taken. Reading the article all the way through is a better option, though I suspect there's a few folk who'll just shut their eyes tight, claim they've read it, and then start coming out with stuff that shows that they haven't read it at all...

Violet...